Tastes like summer

Yesterday Dad didn't want to cook lunch so we drove to Boston Market and ate there. Dad has only eaten Vietnamese food for maybe seven years now, so this was a surprise to me. That's when he told me about the hospitalization, and I realized that we were at good old Boston Market as a direct result of nostalgia, fear of aging, and acceptance of helplessness.

Nostalgia: growing up in Minnesota, we ate Boston Market pretty regularly when Dad didn't feel like cooking in the winter. While I enjoy my rotisserie chicken as much as the next gal, I always looked forward to summers. In the summer, the local boy scout troops would set up the sausage stand in front of Cub Foods. After grocery shopping with your cranky kids on a hot summer day, you could get a fresh-grilled bratwurst (or even better, a Polish potato sausage), a bag of chips, and a can of soda for one dollar. ONE DOLLAR! Needless to say my entire family loved this deal, and this was one thing we would never fight about.

Nowadays my friends and I joke about my second sausage stomach. When I visited Berlin for a few days, I could eat three full meals a day and several sausages on the side. I love sausages, bratwurst, knockwurst, weinerwurst, weisswurst, bierwurst, and especially potato sausage. Sometimes I wonder about my endless capacity for sausage, but I'm pretty sure it's just like any Southern Californian's endless capacity for summer. It's hard to get sick of something with so many good memories attached to it, especially if it's a food item. Sausages taste like summer taste like family taste like no fighting, if only for the length of time it takes to drive to Cub Foods.

Fear of aging: my parents are older. My mother was 38 when she had me, my father 45. This isn't so crazy if you realize that my father was 25 when my half-brother was born and 23 when my half-sister was born. Maybe he married the love of his life when he was 21. My mother married the love of her life when she was 26. Too bad those two sentences don't refer to the same event. They divorced in 1988, either shortly before or shortly after I was born.

These are just facts. But we're all going to be old people someday, maybe senile, probably cranky, with an abundance of physical and mental ills. That's a fact too. Just because something is a fact doesn't mean you have to acknowledge it, or accept it, or tell it to your kids before they're teenagers.

Acceptance of helplessness: when I asked why he had my mother drive him to the hospital, which then took him in an ambulance to another one, my father tried to explain. My Vietnamese translation will do very poorly here. He said that his thoughts were blocked, and it was too difficult to live with. That's when he knew he had to go. But when I asked why he came back from the hospital, he said that the people there were not there at all, really. And so he had to go.

Did it help? Is this just how growing older works? Do things just get worse?

As I said, my father hadn't eaten non-Vietnamese food in several years, but there we were at Boston Market. The medicines had made him paranoid of food prepared by others, the aging made him afraid of change. Or maybe it's the other way around. In any case he had American food at the hospital and felt fine, and he also realized that now was the time for some changes in his life. So there we were, at Boston Market, having a calm conversation about falling apart. My mashed potatoes tasted like summer.