Sunday Rambling

I went to breakfast this morning, to Carrie’s because I knew it would be less crowded than the Hole in One. Rosalie didn’t go. She only goes to keep me company and I assured her I was not alone even though alone. I always had my friend, whatever book I was then reading, in this case Kate Atkinson’s short story collection Not the End of the World. She has become one of my very best friends.

I sat at a small table along the wall separating the waitress run and the dining room. Carrie’s is a pleasant little restaurant in a U-shaped shopping area across the street from the Hole in One, with assorted artifacts from the Thirties and Forties residing on a high shelf along the walls—canisters of ancient coffee, empty boxes of saltine crackers and CheeseIts, oil lamps and tiny dolls and porcelain cats and dogs. Beneath the upper shelf were a dozen Norman Rockwell reproductions—the cop and the runaway boy sitting at a lunch counter, the triple self-portrait of Rockwell leaning out to see himself in a mirror as he painted himself (I wonder if any of our mirror images would be more dexter than sisister, as Rockwell's pipe now seems to be in the dexter side of his mouth), three baseball umpires checking the amount of rainfall, the apprehensive boy in the dentist’s chair, the grandfather and grandson fishing in the old mill stream. Where would the Saturday Evening Post have been without Rockwell? Where would Rockwell have been without the SEP? I think theirs was a mutual success story. Unfortunately, I was seated too near a tall old man and his grandson (and not the Rockwell pair). The man must have been a bit deaf, as are many of our seniors here in Sun City West, because he kept up a steady barrage of over-loud questions for the grandson, a boy of four or five. He (the grandfather) was wearing shorts (what else?) and a vary-colored shirt and his legs were knobby and varicosed and ugly. Why not wear long pants when one’s legs are as ugly as his? I certainly do. My legs, from ankle to knee are so ugly that no one but I and Rosalie and assorted doctors and the cats ever see them. I wouldn’t want anyone to see them and wonder why I didn’t wear long pants. The cats no long arch their backs and his when they see my legs. My legs are blackened from the psoriasis, still psoriatic scaly but less so than a year ago, and stitched all over from various surgical scars, with two deep depressions from my ill-advised radiation treatments, the main one the silver dollar-sized wound I treated for three years, like a meteor crater near my shin bone. As I said—ugly.

I ordered eggs over medium, fried potatoes, ham, and a biscuit, all of which was about twice as much as I needed. I wonder how in my pre-denture past I was able to eat all the food I was served when out to dine. I’ve since found that almost every restaurant serves dishes that are nearly twice as much as a diner needs, a fact that partly explains our rising obesity in this country. And yet we all seem to oink it all down for fear of not getting our money’s worth, or of hearing that parental voice when we were young, “Just think of all the little boys and girls starving in Africa or India. You must clean up your plates.” And clean them up we did. Can’t let the rest of the world think we’re throwing good food away. Can’t let all those starving children think we’re wasting food. Maybe we should take half of all the food we try to consume and ship it to all those starving children. But I’m sure we’d find some way to screw up that kind of charity.