Young and Old

Originally written late May/early June, 2007 on a scratch paper notepad.

My chosen destination for a late lunch on this warm sunny spring day was a Friendly’s restaurant snuggled in strip-mall suburbia. A local establishment (its headquarters mere miles away in Wilbraham, MA,) it’s changed little since I was a child, and changes little from place to place.
I would hesitate to call anything about its décor “homegrown” or distinctively New England. The closest it comes is a tiny shelf of assorted knickknacks perched high above the reach of the restaurant’s youngest patrons. I see old books and copper pails, some blue-colored glass jars, an old oatmeal tin. Somehow amidst the old-time wooden chairs and tables and a panoply of dingy carnival colors, these oddball antiquities don’t seem out of place. Nor do the oldest patrons: pairs of old men and pairs of old women mostly at this time of day; one supposes that it’s still an hour or two too early for the husband and wife duos seeking the ever-elusive early bird special.
The oldness of these old folks has sojourned far past the limbo of politically correct terms. Their wrinkles are deep and their clothing is defiantly elderly. Something about New England. The old people here, for the most part, don’t suffer the foolishness of the “new” old, where Dreams Don’t Retire at retirement. Big polarized lenses in metal rimmed glasses grace worn leather faces; above those faces, thinning grey hair given dark highlights by the oily grime sold to them by similarly grizzled barbers. Atop the hair, beat up baseball caps with cheaply sewn-in patches, anchors and lobsters, an old domestic beer or a landscaping company. The women are saddled with devil-may-care pastels from head to toe, scarves of any material and any color, stark-white hair obtainable only through the use of multiple shampoos. Their one fine distinction from the less-fair sex is their steadfast refusal to wear socks with their sandals.
But Friendly’s isn’t merely a place for the old. The young flock here as well, as it has mastered the fine art of offering visually stunning confectionary blitzkriegs over endless scoops of ice cream. Barely sitting through the pretense of a meal as the weather warms, each child fusses and fidgets and utterly loses focus as their outing overseer makes tired stabs at maintaining decorum. It is, after all, still a restaurant. There are still waitstaff in front of whom to be mortified. There are still old people, many of them in fact, who only seem to be inured by the ravages of time to the inappropriateness of hijinks and monkeyshines. In truth their soured New England faces are a nonstop transmission of disdain for the follies of the subsequent generation, and of their total inability to discipline the next generation down the line.
I sit here an outsider, neither young nor old. I sit alongside teenage waiters and staff. I sit with dogged chaperones who would otherwise go to the Bertucci’s down the strip. I sit in the restaurant chain where I sat sullenly and emptied-out 7 years ago, opposite the fair-skinned southern shadow who was headed again, inevitably, to hospital. I sit in the restaurant chain where my whole family went – fine-wine drinkers and cheese-eaters alongside D.C. lawyers alongside college students and their parents - drained and exhausted, as we waited for my grandfather to slip silently into the night, 6 years ago this March. These are the memories that I, the neither young nor old, have of this place. It stands still, unfazed by these personal tragedies, as anachronistic as the times and places I found myself sitting there.
I remember the face of a man in vanilla, Reese’s Pieces eyes, ice-cream-cone hat, tufts of whipped cream hair, resting upon a pewter perch that was unnaturally icy to the touch.
I can’t remember what he tasted like.