Ruled by Twos, Covid and Fine Dining

Since I moved into this complex that I’m officially dubbing Lady Land two people have died, two people have been quarantined with Covid, ambulances have shown up twice and two fire alarms went off---both false alarms. The last one sent us all out to the sidewalk in the early morning, most of us still in our sleepwear. Today it could have gone off at noon and I’d have been caught in my ratty bathrobe and L.L. Bean, long flannel nightgown. Old Sunday-not-go-to-meetings habits are hard to break. Another Sunday habit I've fallen back into is doing my laundry and housework then and, yes, I accomplish a lot in that ratty bathrobe. It's how it got ratty in the first place.

Residents here were trying to figure out who was in quarantine because management wasn’t giving out their names or the building they live in which I presume is because of HEPAA laws. People were scared we’d all get quarantined if anyone else gets sick. Masks are mandatory here as of today 11/19 (and again statewide in public places) and if you refuse to get on-site tested---twice now---you can’t eat in the restaurant or cafe’ or go to any of the classes. Staff is tested daily. We had to show our vaccination cards when we made our final payments, too, before moving in. So this campus feels as safer than any other random place in town.

When the news of the quarantine first broke I had a reservation to eat in the restaurant and I was the only one there for a whole hour which is not normal. At least I didn’t have to worry about being asked to sit with someone I didn’t know well enough to identify them in a lineup. Oh, and the secret of who was in quarantine finally got revealed when I happened to be sitting by the fireplace in the lobby when a woman near-by got a bouquet of flowers delivered to her. "What's the occasion?" someone asked, and she replied, "I just got out of quarantine yesterday." She and her husband both. They'd been vaccinated but still got a mild case of Covid from their grandson, got an infusion of some kind and got over it quickly. She's been wearing a full face plastic shield ever since.

If I was into food blogging the Cider Chicken I ordered that night was yummy and perfect for photo-documenting in a slick-paged food magazine. It had a sauce on it made with walnuts, cranberries, cubes of yams and cider that turned the chicken into a golden thing of beauty. The favor profiles the chef comes up with are so refined but he never serves enough veggies with his entrees. Last week I had lamb chops for the first time ever in my life and they came with nine snow peas. Taste wise and presentation wise it was to die-for but I guess I have pedestrian tastes when it comes to serving food, if you’re going to give me a giant white plate I want an old school balance on that plate of meat, potatoes and vegetables. The “sculptures” made with meat or fish on those giant plates are pretty but I’m going to get scurvy, rickets or malnutrition if I don’t start eating carrots and peas for breakfast.  

Of course, I could order more of the homemade soups in the cafe` or their salads but salads have no appeal to me in cold weather months (nor do soups in the summer). I plan on ordering the soup twice a week to stay within my food allowance. I’ve got it all figured out: Once a month I’ll do the Sunday brunch for $20 and once a week I’ll do the fine dinning restaurant for $12 to $15 a meal, twice a week I’ll do an under $5 choice in the cafe` and the rest of my cafe` meals will be $7. I’d hate to see how far some of my fellow residents are going over they $200 allowances, who eat in the restaurant every time they’re open plus they have wine or cocktails every night and dessert---even in the cafe`. Desserts are the biggest bargain here at $2.50. Award winning recipes, I’m sure, but I can’t stand seeing the bird-like eaters only eating half of their key-lime pie or other featured dessert and not taking the rest back to their apartments in a take-out box. Ya, I know, that’s why they’re skinning and I’m not. But at least I don’t have to live with the guilt of all those kids starving to death in China because I didn’t clean my plate.   

At the top is a photo nabbed off our campus website of our restaurant. Way to the back and behind the glass and navy paneled wall is an area we can reserve for family parties and that's where they set up the Sunday and holiday brunches. To the far right in the back is the bar. This place and the cafe` share a kitchen and the entrances are only ten feet a part in the complex which is how some people get wine or cocktails from the bar, then bring them over to cafe` to go with their cheaper meals. I haven't done that yet. I'm saving my first drinks-with-dinner experience for something special. 

It's been a lot of years since I've had a designated driver so I could do a drink with dinner out. Here, I can just walk home. I'm making friends with the night security guard so I could---in theory---ask him to watch me walk from the main building to my building to make sure I don't face-plant on the sidewalk and died of exposure. Or I could just tag along behind him when he does one of this every few hours walk around the outside of the buildings because he walks right past my door on his rounds.

He's a college kid with cornrows in his hair, studying for a law degree. And I can't help thinking he'd make a great cover model on a romance book. In addition to being great eye candy, he's got that look in his eye like he enjoys people and connects on a deeper level when you let him in. If I was writing a book right now I'd have him meet my fictional granddaughter for a torrid affair that ends with a small wedding down at the lake with swans in the background and me as the maid-of-honor for bringing them together. Why do we have to get old and run out of time to do all the things we can dream up? Maybe next year if I'm still alive and kicking I'll take part in the NaNoWritMo challenge again where you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. I've done it a couple of times and while I didn't make it to 50,000 words I came close once---over 40,000---and it was fun to hang around their message board during those Novembers. In the meantime I could do research on my lovely, fantasy granddaughter and a very real, super-nice security guard. ©

the room we can reserve for family parties

Restaurants and Silent Migraines

Thanksgiving is just around the corner and I’ll be spending it alone unless a last minute invitation comes which is unlikely. Families grow and there is less and less room around the table for widowed aunts as kids start bringing their friends home from college. At least that’s what I’m guessing is the reason why my niece-in-law---who usually asks me over for Thanksgiving---didn’t this year. I picked that clue up from Facebook. It doesn’t matter. I’ve been getting my fill of the traditional turkey dinner at the takeout window of a local chain. They do a fabulous job---as good as any homemade turkey, mash potatoes, stuffing and pie and the eight dollar dinner is enough food for two meals at home. In fact, dozens of people around town will be serving their pies over the holidays. They take orders well in advance and a few days before thanksgiving and Christmas people are overflowing the parking lot to pick up their pies. Me? If I’m indulging at the Dutch Boy Restaurant I’d rather have one of their cream puffs. I grew up sharing a cream puff with my mom when we'd be by her favorite bakery so they're a comfort food for me.

I’ve written about the Dutch Boy Restaurant before and how my husband would never go there because years ago its owner filled the place with religious tracts. Over the decades most---but not all---of the tracts have disappeared but Don never let go of his dislike for the place. I go there occasionally, with various groups I lunch with but it feels like I’m cheating on my husband. The church crowd are still loyal patrons and why not, the owner is a local philanthropist who actually walks the talk and not all Christians in my sphere of knowledge do. Locally owned restaurants and bars seem to draw like minded people, don’t they. The biker who opens up a bar draws the bikers and the urban millenniums draw people who love small batch beers. In a small town on the outskirts of town we once went to a restaurant that had White Nationalist and Michigan Militia crap all over the walls. We didn’t notice it until after we’d placed our orders, so we made the best of it and did some serious eavesdropping before we got the heck out of there. It gave us great pleasure a year later when we learned they'd gone out of business. Its owner is probably still scratching his head, trying to figure out why.

Speaking of restaurants this week I had a two hour lunch at the Guy-Land Cafeteria with my Gathering Girls pals. I wish I’d met these women much earlier in life. Only back years ago I wouldn’t have had anything in common with a bunch of young widows raising their kids on their own. We don’t spend a lot of time talking about serious topics because someone will end up saying something that cracks us all up and we get side-tracked easily by laughter. Silly things like all of us were having trouble remembering the name of the restaurant we started out going to 2 ½ years ago and by the time we figured it out we all had aching bellies from laughing. It was Tim Horton’s but we ran through Tom Horton, Ted Horton, Jim Horton and Bob Horton before we landed on the right name. And there were descriptions like, “It’s the place is right down the street from the senior hall.” “They have another one in front of Meijer.” "They sell Cold Stone ice cream too." It was one of those conversations that takes a village to find the words we were all searching for. We seem to be having a lot of ‘village conversations’ lately.

The next day I was back at the Guy-Land Cafeteria, my favorite place to people watch and write but I was there for a different purpose that day. I was hungry! I got up at 5:30 AM and was on the road by 7:00 without so much as a cup of coffee. The cafeteria was a convenient place to stop on my way home from a semi-emergency appointment with my ophthalmologist. I was experiencing a half-circle of bright flashing lights in an outer ring with an inner ring of colored lights flashing around a core of blurriness. The fear, of course, was the retina was detaching which is an emergency requiring surgery. What I didn’t know until the examination is that when you experience this effect and it goes away in 15-30 minutes that automatically rules out a detachment and puts it in the realm of a retinal migraine. If both eyes had been effected then a TIA would be the more likely cause.

Retinal migraines are also known as silent migraines because they don't come with pain like classic migraines do. Known as silent migraines because you get all the other symptoms. I never knew you could get a migraine without a headache but the doctor said it’s one of the few benefits of being over 60. Something about our veins getting too old to contract. This was my second eye ‘episode’ in a month and I’m to start keeping a diary of what I was doing just before the next one started---listing any stress, lack of sleep and foods eaten in an effort to nail down a trigger. Retinal migraines tend to come in clusters over a few months so he thinks there will be more. Knowledge is power. The next time it happens I’m to say, “Oh, boy, nap time!” Then lay down for a half hour until it passes. If it lasts longer than 30 minutes then it's time for Plan B just in case it is a retinal detachment in the making. ©

Day Trips and Judgement Women

Pop quiz. If I said I went to a bar and grille three times in one day, would you believe me? If you answered ‘no’ you’d be wrong. Thursday was the annual restaurant hop organized by the senior hall and all three courses of our progressive meal took place in businesses with “Bar and Grille” as part of their name. Our senior hall bus holds twenty-five people and it made five trips---on different days---to a tourist town along Lake Michigan. They ought to rename this event “Eat and Shop” because that’s what we do. This year we went to Saugatuck which is one of my favorite places on earth. I’ve written about the town before and I described it as “a town with a history rooted in boat building and lumbering and it’s often called the Art Coast of Michigan because of its 100 year old, 115 acres art colony with ties to The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The town is a mecca for people from Chicago who own ‘summer places’ in town or boat over on the weekends, a high energy town with a wintertime population of around 1,000 that swells to 3,000 in the summers.” 

We couldn’t have asked for a better weather day for the restaurant hop and I had the luck of the Irish when a woman I didn’t know well sat next to me and somehow we clicked conversation wise. That doesn’t always happen when you take potluck on the bus. A lot of people sign up with a friend so they’ll have someone to pal around with all afternoon. The bus dropped us off for our appetizer course where I had a salad dressing made with apples, caramel sauce and cranberries over spinach, mixed lettuce and soy nuts. Ohmygod, that was good and I’m not fond of salads. Then we had an hour to shop our way down to the main entrée. I had pre-ordered a hamburger because I hadn’t had one in a long time but I wish I had ordered the fish tacos. 

We had a young waiter who impressed all the ladies at my table with how skillfully he served twenty-five people all at the same time. In fact one of the ladies wanted to tip him extra over the 20% our senior hall pays. But when we got to our dessert course at a different restaurant a woman, who reminded me of a 1950’s librarian with her white hair pulled back into a tight bun and her glasses hanging on a lanyard, complained the entire time while we ate our strawberry shortcakes and brownies about the young waiter at the last restaurant. She said she was going to tell the senior hall director when we got back home to call the entrée restaurant and chew them out for poor service. Her problem, it seems, was she only got a half a cup of coffee before the waiter's pot ran out and it took too long for him to come back with another. I’m starting to dislike old women with ruby red lipstick and tiny lips that they purse in disdain. As I watched those lips moving after a while all I heard was, "I'm old and ornery blah, blah, blah." Two of the ladies at my table also got a half cup of coffee. The waiter had split what was left in the pot between their two cups so neither one had to wait for the fresh pot to brew, he said, and we all thought that was a consider thing to do. Funny how different people can perceive the same set of circumstances differently.

I ended up eating and shopping with my seatmate from the bus. On past trips that’s never happened. She latched on to me after the appetizer course and at first I was annoyed that I wasn’t free to roam the streets with my many memories of Saugatuck to keep me company. Then I thought, what the heck, Jean, it’s probably not healthy to pick the past over the here and now. So I quit thinking about slipping away. By the time our second block of shopping time rolled around she’d spend all the money she wanted---she bought a $45 ring and an $25 art print---and I’m not a shopper by nature so we walked down to the channel, found a bench and watched two tug boats bring a cement pier down the river and an excavating machine on a barge dredging the channel deeper and we talked to the other tourists strolling by on the board walk.

When we got back to the senior hall I said to my seatmate, “I enjoyed spending the afternoon with you” and I meant it. She replied, “I did you too. You’re very easy to talk with.” We had some things in common but she’s a "casino fly" and I have zero interest in casinos so our chance match-up won’t go anywhere in the possible friendship department. Listen to me! I was disgusted by Miss. Ruby Red Lips because I deemed her to be too judgmental and here I am being judgmental about people who love casinos. If I was Catholic I’d be saying some Hail Mary’s about now. (She actually went on an eight day bus tour where all they did is go from casino to casino! I didn't even know tours like that existed.) ©

* The print above is by James Brandess and is of the Kalamazoo River, in the heart of Saugatuck

From Dogs and X-cons to Light Bulbs

The day after a city has dug itself out after a snowstorm and a bright sun has turned the white landscape into sparkling crystals you can’t help smiling. All the postponed errands and canceled appointments go back on the table, we’re out and about and happy about that. Yesterday I dropped Levi off at the Canine Foo-Foo Beauty Parlor, then I took myself out for a western omelet with an English muffin and orange marmalade. I ask for a takeout box right away and put half the omelet inside before I’ve had my first bite. Out of sight, out of mind because old habits die hard---if it stayed on the plate I’d keep eating beyond what it takes to satisfy my hunger. My check came to just under ten dollars and I left a three dollar tip. It doesn’t matter if the check comes to six or sixteen dollars, I leave the same three dollars. Basing a tip on how much you eat seems stupid to me. The waitress comes to the table the same number of times to take and deliver an order, to refill coffee and leave the check. Once in a while I’ll add a fourth dollar if I’m sitting next to someone from the Lunch and Movie Club who just leaves a dollar behind for the waitress to split with her busboy.

My favorite place to have omelets always has a couple of heavily tattoo busboys and/or cooks. Arms, hands, necks and faces tattooed everywhere. It’s a local, three restaurant chain and I've been going to the chain for over thirty-five years. My husband and I suspected that they hire right out of an x-prisoners-needing-jobs catalog. Years ago it was the only place that was open all night long and we’d go there to get our coffee thermos filled during the night or to get breakfast at dawn when our lots were all plowed. The place was just down the street from the police station and the officers were doing the same thing so it didn’t take long to get over the fear of being around scary looking, inked-up guys who knew how to cook and clear tables but seemed not to know how to talk to customers. They remind me of a line from Shawshank Redemption when a newly paroled guy was bagging groceries and asked, “Permission to piss, boss” and the grocer replied that he doesn’t have to ask to use the bathroom and the x-con thinks but doesn’t say out loud, Forty years I been asking permission to piss. I can't squeeze a drop without say-so.

I have no discipline what so ever today. Here it is 1:00 in the afternoon and I still haven’t had breakfast or gotten dressed. But my keyboard is hot from being on the computer since nine this morning. Don’t get alarmed. My not getting dressed isn’t an old-lady-loses-interest-in-life thing. I come from a long line of bathrobe dwellers. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I did manage to feed the dog and give him fresh water. Levi's too mouthy for me to ignore in the morning. Thanks goodness for that or he’d look like one of those malnourished dogs in a Humane Society ad campaign to get donations.

John Grogan, author of Marley and Me wrote near the end of the book: “A person can learn a lot from a dog, even a loopy one like ours. Marley taught me about living each day with unbridled exuberance and joy, about seizing the moment and following your heart. He taught me to appreciate the simple things---a walk in the woods, a fresh snowfall, a nap in a shaft of winter sunlight. And as he grew old and achy, he taught me about optimism in the face of adversity. Mostly, he taught me about friendship and selflessness and, above all else, unwavering loyalty.” 

Clearly, Levi has taught me many of the same things but he’s also taught me that barking in front of the cupboard where I keep his Milk-Bone Trail Mix is as annoying as a kid beating on a drum. He’s taught me that barking at cats, rabbits and other dogs all require a different pitch of intensity and that when someone comes to the front door it requires a combination of excited yipping  and tail chasing. Even if a tattooed x-con came was standing on the other side of the glass, Levi would happily welcome him or her into his circle of people to judge by their actions and not their looks.

The day I dropped Levi off at the groomers I still had a couple of hours to kill before I could pick him back up again, so after my omelet I went to Lowe’s in search of a full spectrum light bulb. They say they are good for wintertime depression and since I’ve been doing a couple of hours of knitting every evening, I thought I could kill two birds with one stone…err with one light bulb. While looked up and down the row of bulbs I ran into something called a C-Sleep light bulb. They are Bluetooth enabled to work with an app on your phone that helps you change the bulb between three settings, one of which is supposed to set you up for a sleep cycle before bedtime. I didn’t buy one but I went home thinking that the world is getting too complicated. Can you imagine spending forty years in prison and coming out to all the new devices and app tricks we have now? Heck, I’m still bummed out that we can’t get telephone directories with white and yellow page sections anymore. ©

Photo Above: That's Levi after having fun digging in the snow.