The ‘bunch’ at brunch, aye carrumba!…
We “do” brunch, the sonnies and I. Every week. It has become quite the family tradition… Yesterday we had Dear Husband with us since he was on vacation this week. It was fun and we were so durned polite we even waited for one of us to stop talking before another one started. That was different. Usually we all just start talking at once and only by accident do we actually manage to corral the conversation. The whole world is coming apart around us and yet this family, this day, was as peaceful as a city park full of flower children in the 60’s… Who were these people posing as us, I wonder?
Dear Husband and I had a terrible time getting up yesterday morning due to extreme loss of sleep since we didn’t succumb to the sandman until 4:30 AM. But we’d have had trouble getting up even if we’d slept for 18 hours. Since we were late for our assignation with the sonnys, we were prepared to be soundly chastised by “those who’ve been chastised” before…by us, but we needn’t have worried. In the best family tradition, the sonnys were running late too. We’re a close family…we all sleepwalk and sleeptalk like pros, and we’re all subject to drooping in chairs like unwatered ferns in a drought too.
Without any prior discussion on our part, the family car headed itself in the right direction to our favorite purveyor of delicious omelettes and other gustatory delights. So regularly do we brunch there the car operates on autopilot. We all carefully and exhaustively scrutinized the menu as usual, and then we proceeded to order the same thing we did the week before and the week before that and... This time the waitress told me what I was having. She was right too.
There was only one thing wrong with this picture of ‘brunchatory’ paradise yesterday… It was the thoroughly pickled and ‘smoked’ brother-in-law who materialized at our table! He just happens to be a chef there and we studiously avoid remembering that when at all possible. He’s not usually there on our brunch days, as least as far as we know. Literally not there... And figuratively too, I suppose.
He didn’t look at all good. He didn’t smell so good either. One thing he has working for him though. When he dies they won’t have to waste precious chemicals to embalm him…the job is already pretty much finished. I’m happy to say that with a modicum of semi-ignoring type tactics, he de-materialized again. And we all prayed it wasn’t to the kitchen that he was headed… It isn’t that he’s a bad guy. More that he isn’t…
Not so long ago, when the sonnys and I sat down to commence our routine brunching rituals we had an unusal experience. I espied a familiar looking fellow just across the aisle who looked a lot like my brother but I wasn’t sure, even though he was less than 6 feet away. The guy didn’t look up, he was totally in his own world, which is part of what made me think it was my brother and he appeared to be doing some sort of complicated computation (another clue to him being my brother).
He is a quiet, reserved, nerdy type of fellow, my brother…extremely fit and active though, and an optical engineer also skilled in laser technology. In fact, right now he’s involved in working on the optics of the Mars rover…
You might ask how it is that I can’t even recognize my own brother… But older sonny, who had him in his direct line of sight, couldn’t be sure either. You see, my brother doesn’t always look like himself. Sometimes he looks more like one or the other of his two best friends…who often look more like him. I’m not kidding. I’ll see one of them walking along somewhere and I’m positive it’s Dear Brother. They look so much alike, I’m now considering adding them as brothers too. Why not? I can’t lose. They’re beyond the stage of pinching, hitting or kicking and, I would no longer have to worry about identification… I could just say “hey, there’s my brother(!)” and I'd be right.
The sonnys and I had quite a bit of discussion about whether it was, in fact, him…or not…and…whether we should say something to him, if it was... We didn’t want to bother him since he was so ‘involved’ in whatever he was doing and it wouldn’t have been fair to distract him. If it was even him! This was probably one of the weirdest experiences I can confess to. I mean, I was 6 feet from the guy and I still couldn’t be sure if it was my own brother!
The waitress was the one who finally resolved the dilemma. When she brought a refill for his coffee, he looked up and there was no mistaking him anymore. It was my beloved brother, and uncle of my sonnys. I called to him, he did a double-take, moved immediately over to our table and we all enjoyed chow and conversation and a resolution to what had been developing into a major mystery (for us).
Summer is almost over and soon the church my parental units belong to will be having gigantic brunches every other month, and where the sonnys’ friends, their wives and roommates and older sonny will usually meet up with us for exciting mega-brunching. It’s always fun to get together with all “the kids.” Or almost all. The only one usually missing is younger sonny, he of the Retail Blog He will be toiling away while we revel, since he is a captive of retail hell on Sundays. Poor fellow. And sports that we are, we always feel obliged to fill him in on what he missed. Those are probably the days his blog entry displays an extra measure of animus.
But there’s always the weekly brunch to help salve his enmity… After all, I pay!
Dear Husband and I had a terrible time getting up yesterday morning due to extreme loss of sleep since we didn’t succumb to the sandman until 4:30 AM. But we’d have had trouble getting up even if we’d slept for 18 hours. Since we were late for our assignation with the sonnys, we were prepared to be soundly chastised by “those who’ve been chastised” before…by us, but we needn’t have worried. In the best family tradition, the sonnys were running late too. We’re a close family…we all sleepwalk and sleeptalk like pros, and we’re all subject to drooping in chairs like unwatered ferns in a drought too.
Without any prior discussion on our part, the family car headed itself in the right direction to our favorite purveyor of delicious omelettes and other gustatory delights. So regularly do we brunch there the car operates on autopilot. We all carefully and exhaustively scrutinized the menu as usual, and then we proceeded to order the same thing we did the week before and the week before that and... This time the waitress told me what I was having. She was right too.
There was only one thing wrong with this picture of ‘brunchatory’ paradise yesterday… It was the thoroughly pickled and ‘smoked’ brother-in-law who materialized at our table! He just happens to be a chef there and we studiously avoid remembering that when at all possible. He’s not usually there on our brunch days, as least as far as we know. Literally not there... And figuratively too, I suppose.
He didn’t look at all good. He didn’t smell so good either. One thing he has working for him though. When he dies they won’t have to waste precious chemicals to embalm him…the job is already pretty much finished. I’m happy to say that with a modicum of semi-ignoring type tactics, he de-materialized again. And we all prayed it wasn’t to the kitchen that he was headed… It isn’t that he’s a bad guy. More that he isn’t…
Not so long ago, when the sonnys and I sat down to commence our routine brunching rituals we had an unusal experience. I espied a familiar looking fellow just across the aisle who looked a lot like my brother but I wasn’t sure, even though he was less than 6 feet away. The guy didn’t look up, he was totally in his own world, which is part of what made me think it was my brother and he appeared to be doing some sort of complicated computation (another clue to him being my brother).
He is a quiet, reserved, nerdy type of fellow, my brother…extremely fit and active though, and an optical engineer also skilled in laser technology. In fact, right now he’s involved in working on the optics of the Mars rover…
You might ask how it is that I can’t even recognize my own brother… But older sonny, who had him in his direct line of sight, couldn’t be sure either. You see, my brother doesn’t always look like himself. Sometimes he looks more like one or the other of his two best friends…who often look more like him. I’m not kidding. I’ll see one of them walking along somewhere and I’m positive it’s Dear Brother. They look so much alike, I’m now considering adding them as brothers too. Why not? I can’t lose. They’re beyond the stage of pinching, hitting or kicking and, I would no longer have to worry about identification… I could just say “hey, there’s my brother(!)” and I'd be right.
The sonnys and I had quite a bit of discussion about whether it was, in fact, him…or not…and…whether we should say something to him, if it was... We didn’t want to bother him since he was so ‘involved’ in whatever he was doing and it wouldn’t have been fair to distract him. If it was even him! This was probably one of the weirdest experiences I can confess to. I mean, I was 6 feet from the guy and I still couldn’t be sure if it was my own brother!
The waitress was the one who finally resolved the dilemma. When she brought a refill for his coffee, he looked up and there was no mistaking him anymore. It was my beloved brother, and uncle of my sonnys. I called to him, he did a double-take, moved immediately over to our table and we all enjoyed chow and conversation and a resolution to what had been developing into a major mystery (for us).
Summer is almost over and soon the church my parental units belong to will be having gigantic brunches every other month, and where the sonnys’ friends, their wives and roommates and older sonny will usually meet up with us for exciting mega-brunching. It’s always fun to get together with all “the kids.” Or almost all. The only one usually missing is younger sonny, he of the Retail Blog He will be toiling away while we revel, since he is a captive of retail hell on Sundays. Poor fellow. And sports that we are, we always feel obliged to fill him in on what he missed. Those are probably the days his blog entry displays an extra measure of animus.
But there’s always the weekly brunch to help salve his enmity… After all, I pay!
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