family restaurant

I joined my Dad today on a trip to Boyertown, taking my Grandma to lunch with her brother and sisters. They have gotten together for lunch every couple months for years now. They are spread around from my Grandma in Lancaster Co., the farthest west, to my Great Uncle Dick and aunt Bertie, in New Jersey. Then there is great Uncle Donald with deep smile lines around his eyes, and his wife, Anna, and the oldest sibling Aunt Rachel. The last time I went with them, her husband, Uncle Bud was still living, slowly pushing his walker in front of him. Rachel has a walker now too, and will be ninety on her next birthday. My Grandma, Harvella, is the second oldest. She recently moved into an apartment in a retirement home. She had a mild stroke a week or so later, and is not seeing out of her left eye.
Boyertown is chosen as a convenient halfway point. It is an interesting town, very different from the Lancaster/ Dauphin County area. It appears to have once been a wealthy town, there is a lot of stained glass and wrought iron, and some side streets are still cobblestone. Grandma is very worried on the way that we will be lost or late. This is par for the course riding with Grandma, and Dad continues to attempt to assure her that he knows where we are going. I lay down in the backseat and drift off to sleep. The restaurant of choice for my Grandma and company, is a family restaurant, serving old fashioned, very Pa Dutch fare. It is paneled in dark wood inside, with large bowed beams along the walls like the inside of a covered bridge, and decorated to the nines in jack-o-lanterns and scarecrows. When we all sit down at the table, Aunt Bertie quietly suggests to Grandma that she might like to sit toward the end of the table on the left side, so that she can see down the length of the table with her good eye. Grandma laughs and says good thinking.
I have learned that there are different tastes in food by generation, and perhaps that there are even different passing styles. When I go out I gravitate toward sandwiches and wraps with lots of lettuce and vinaigrette dressings. Think Panera or Isaacs. This crowd prefers lamb and mint jelly, oyster pie, lettuce and hot bacon dressing, corn fritters, pickled beets, coleslaw and jello salad. I listen as they chat about replacing appliances, new washers and sweepers as early Christmas presents. Uncle Donald is in the market for an exercise bike. I enjoy watching the couples. Aunt Bertie elbows and smiles at Uncle Dick when he makes a joke. Aunt Anna interrupts Uncle Donald's stories to finish his sentence. He still finishes it after her, repeating her words to reinforce them. Anna watches him with her eyes, clearly happy to sit beside him, and join in his conversation. Aunt Bertie asks everyone if they remember a place, a home where you could get fresh apple cider, where they made it in the barn behind the house. Aunt Rachel decides that she is not hungry and doesn't finish her lamb, which they try to hand off to me and Dad. It isn't so bad with the mint jelly, though I consumed as little as I could get away with. But Aunt Rachel finishes her entire piece of peanut butter pie, and who could blame her, peanut butter pie beats lamb anyday.
Dad purchases a half dozen of the house special on the way out. Pumpkin donuts, and we split one in the car, though we are both very full. I fall asleep again in the backseat, considering my own life and the choices that I have made myself, and wondering what I will be like in another sixty years, and who I will be sitting down at family restaurants with, ordering a chicken ceasar salad. But tonight I am hanging out with my Dad, listening to Prairie Home Companion, eating pumpkin donuts and popcorn, and baking cinnamon rolls to take to Sunday School in the morning, and life feels sort of painfully and surprisingly rich. It must be melancholy. It must be October.