Dinner On A Dime

On Vacation

Because I'm in touch with members of my high school Class of '70, I learned recently that the dear old Alpine Restaurant on Lee Highway is about to be torn down to make way for a day care center. The second thing I learned was that it had been in operation since 1966, a year during which I was demonstrably alive, and had been for some time. But I couldn't remember the restaurant at all. My friends reminisced about the place, and someone provided a photograph--a fake chalet sort of façade--and I still couldn't recognize it, even though it had to be pretty close to my house. I checked the address.

Ah. The Alpine Restaurant was one and a half blocks from my house. If I stood in the front yard and looked south, I could see it. In its entirety.

Well, such is the nature of my Magic-Slate brain, in which most memory is peeled away for a fresh new sheet in case something interesting comes along. Clearly I have no recollection of the Alpine Restaurant because we never, ever ate there. One of my friends said his family didn't go often because they didn't have the budget for it, so that proves it. My father took the family out to dinner every Saturday night because he believed Mom should not have to cook seven days a week. And every single Saturday night for years we went to the Seven Corners shopping center and ate at the S&W Cafeteria in the basement. Where, I assume, you didn't have to tip.

Somewhere along the line Dad discovered a sit-down Family Restaurant in Cherrydale that fit his budget and we went there a few times. Here's what I remember. They had a cool toothpick dispenser at the cash register. And once, some adult came up to our table to compliment my sister and me for being so well-behaved. Was there another option???

 

There was another restaurant I do remember, but not because our family ate there. We did not. I think it was one of my friend's moms who took us to the brand-new McDonald's, one block west of the Alpine Restaurant (apparently) on Lee Highway, and treated us to a cheeseburger (18 cents), French fries (15 cents), and a chocolate milk shake. My world turned upside-down. How could food be so delicious? I couldn't imagine why we weren't eating there all the time. It had to be in the budget, because I was able to buy my own French fries with babysitting money, and I'm not sure I ever cleared more than four dollars a month.

It probably arrived around 1963 or so. A classic. Came with the two Golden Showers on top. Arches. Whatever. And a sign that said "over one million sold" that got upgraded every few months. At some point it hit "over a billion sold," and very shortly thereafter they settled for "billions and billions." Now there's just a poster in the parking lot that says "You know you're coming in here, just pull out your fucking wallet."

The restaurant thing with my father was fraught. I learned to tip heavily but certainly not from him. He was focused on paying down a mortgage and providing a college education for four children, goals which strike me now as laudable indeed, but didn't impress me one bit as a child. I wanted a bigger house with a rec room. I never got it. Got a stupid B.A. in Biology instead.

Vacation is fun!

We did go to restaurants when we were on vacation. One vacation my mom broke the heck out of her ankle in South Dakota and had to stay in a hospital while Dad drove my sister and me back home to Virginia. We went into a restaurant one night, the only one for miles, and as soon as we got seated we realized we'd made a huge mistake. The place was tinkly with inappropriate laughter from adults with genuine cocktails and the waiter brought enormous leather-bound menus over in which every entrée was at least one decimal point over budget. One of them was "Mermaid Steak," presumably a surf 'n' turf deal. I was terrified. Daddy said we could leave and he got up to tell the waiter we wouldn't be staying, but it took a bit to get his attention, and when I saw a straight path had opened up to the front door, I hollered "Run, Daddy!" and we all peeled out of there. I don't know what we did for dinner.

I would've remembered if it was McDonald's.

The People-Bop

It was dark, and I was sound asleep, and fourteen--that figures in later--and it sounded like someone was throwing gravel at my bedroom window. Because someone was throwing gravel at my bedroom window.

Someone from the Hostel Club. I'd heard about the Hostel Club soon after I enrolled at Yorktown High, in tenth grade. When they had their first meeting of the year, I summoned the gumption to check it out. This was a club devoted to hiking, and bicycling, and canoeing, and camping, and staying in youth hostels. And jollity. I had found the social scene intimidating since sixth grade, but so did these people. They all seemed to be taking AP math and physics courses and being nerds and they were smart as hell and even funnier than hell and completely incapable of fitting in with the In Crowd. I fell in love with all of them at once. Every outing was like a mass date with all the fun left in and all the anxiety stripped out. We were a posse. But I wasn't sure where I stood, being new. And young. Most of the members were seniors, and I was not only a sophomore, but the youngest in my class by as much as two years.

But when I peered out my bedroom window and saw my new friends about to let fly with a handful of gravel, I realized: Yes! Lord love a salamander in springtime, I'm In With The Out Crowd!

"We're going to Carderock," Lynn stage-whispered. "Got any eggs?"

Problem. It wasn't as though I could just leave the house, with eggs, like a big girl. I had to wake up either my mother or my father--I reviewed my recent experiences with both and refined my tactics--and ask if I could pile into Lynn's VW bus two hours before dawn and head off to the park with a bunch of kids and some eggs. I didn't like my chances. My parents were stoutly aware that I was younger than everyone else in the whole world and they had all sorts of rules that didn't apply to anyone else I knew. For instance, I  had the curfew of a novice nun in Las Vegas. None of this seemed fair to me because I was, at the time, as old as I'd ever been, and besides, they were largely if not totally responsible for my age.

I must have chosen the sleepiest and least wary parent to poke because, after a brief explanation that included neutral or cheerful words such as "breakfast" and "dawn" and "real careful driver," I got the go-ahead. And then asked if I could take some eggs, also not a sure thing in a family on a tight budget. I could.

It was my first People-Bop. I'd heard rumors. A kernel of two or three Hostel Clubbers would hatch the plan to kidnap their friends in the middle of the night and go play by dawn's early light. The kernel would always include Lynn because she had the VW bus. She was a real careful driver, but it's not like every now and then we wouldn't try driving with one person blindly operating the gas and brake with his hands, one person leaning over from the back seat to steer, and Lynn barking out instructions from the driver's seat between snorts of laughter. A successful People-Bop required some familiarity with people's bedroom locations, and just after I'd joined the bus, we screwed up at Bob's house when we graveled his father's bedroom by mistake. From inside the halo of our own high spirits, Bob's father seemed to lack a sense of humor. But we still scraped Bob out of it, and just about when the sun was peeking over the horizon, we were at Carderock Recreational Area, cooking up eggs and bacon over camp stoves and having a high time.

An hour later ropes had been anchored on the nearby cliffs and several, if not all, of my friends were rappelling down the sheer face in exuberant leaps, like spring frogs heading for the wetland. So I gave it a go. I thought: the worst part is just letting yourself go over the edge, and then this miracle of rappelling will simply happen. It didn't.  I was unwilling to allow myself to be perpendicular to the cliff and I teetered back and forth on insecure pins, making bargains with God I would abandon within days, and hit the ground and the end of my rock-climbing career at precisely the same moment.

But that's the kind of thing the Hostel Club did. I've had great friends through the years, but none that came in a complete set like that. Maybe it was our youth. Or maybe we really were that special. Could be I'll find out.

Because the great, grand People-Bop of all time is coming up soon. Four or five of us located each other when Facebook came on the scene. Some of us had still maintained ties with outliers. And when we decided to try for a reunion of the Hostel Club, 45 years later, in the Adirondacks in July, somehow we managed to scour the planet and achieve a critical mass. People are flying in. Driving in. Bob, whose father has either moved on or passed on, is going to bike in from New Hampshire. We're tickled we actually located him. Not one of us, though, all in our sixties, is surprised he's coming by bicycle.

We'll see. We won't have youth on our side. We'll have everything else.

The Hinges Of Hades

It's hot. It's so hot I could accessorize with pepperoni slices. It's a hundred and fifty degrees in Portland, Oregon, give or take, and that's just not fair. That would be like going to Disneyland, the happiest place on earth, and Mickey Mouse up and gives you a wedgie. It should never happen. It makes me cranky and miserable and also reminds me of asparagus beetles.

Asparagus beetles live only on asparagus plants. They don't have a Plan B. Their function is to take divots out of your fresh asparagus spears. There might be something in it for them, too, I don't know. A long time ago, we had what was probably the only asparagus patch in a couple square miles. It stood tall and proud, waving its feathery fronds, until the first asparagus beetle showed up, followed by a squadron. How did they locate our little asparagus patch? They followed a gradient of asparagus-fume molecules. They found one molecule, then happened onto a direction with a few more, and kept moving towards the areas of greater asparagus fumelet concentration until they were smack into Divot City. Same gradient concept applies to flies on poop. Don't ask me why moths find porch lights. I think that's just a lack of personal brightness.

When I was a child, I did the same thing, following a temperature gradient. I grew up in Arlington, Virginia, where Satan sends the people who are acting up. We could only play in the sprinkler for so long, and then we pitched over in the shade until the chiggers drove us out, when we slithered into the house on a slime trail of unevaporated sweat, and ultimately prostrated ourselves on the kitchen linoleum in front of a black oscillating fan, arms and legs positioned as far away from each other as possible. This would be the last time anything I did reminded anyone of Leonardo da Vinci. We lay sullen and miserable, our tissues softening like carrots in a saucepan.

Mrs. Tangerose was the first person we knew who bought an air conditioner. A whole group of the church ladies walked over to her house to see, and I tagged along. The house felt like ours except for one room, and we walked in and suddenly it was January in the Yukon, our sweat iced over, and we had never been happier in our lives. That room air conditioner did a lot to bolster my belief in God, until we had to leave.

Our plan at home was different. The house was closed up with the shades drawn all day, and then in the evening Daddy would obsessively check the thermometers until the moment when the inside temperature was 90 and the outside was only 89, and then the windows were flung open and the creaky window box fan upstairs was turned on, pointing out. Ahh! By morning we were comfortably down to 86 or so and the house was shut up again, while Daddy went off to work in an air-conditioned office.

Mom was not the complaining sort, but somewhere in the mid-sixties she expressed some interest in a new-fangled central air conditioning system. Daddy stoutly maintained that going from an air-conditioned office to an air-conditioned bus to an air-conditioned house was not good for you. At moments like that, I tended to consider mine a miracle birth.

Women's lib came along and dropped some ideas in Mom's head and one day she took her flawless grammar and spelling and 135 wpm typing skills and got herself a part-time job, and just like that we had central air, just in time for me to leave home. I grew up and headed north, then west, following a temperature gradient, and that's how I ended up in mossy Oregon with the asparagus beetles. Where global warming is fixing to give us a giant wedgie.