With Mom last night, at Café Lily for dinner, and we enjoyed such a lovely time.
The meatballs were delightful.
Betty is the most delightful host/owner.
Our topics in conversation ranged—as they always do—through to just about everything we can imagine, but they always revolve around our selves (no surprise there, really).
Always on my mind are the concerns a son has for his parent(s), and I get so, so wrapped in the considerations, other and others often get overlooked.
At one point, a woman was seated at an adjacent table; so familiar she did look, I wondered, for a second.
The timelessness between the bread and ordering was as sweet as it always is.
Briefly, I noticed another woman join the other seated next, but I was wrapped in our own moment.
Betty stopped to talk for a minute, then drew close to Mom and whispered:
“Isn’t that ______ ______ at the next table?"
Mom nods, and doesn’t skip a beat.
I thought to my self:
“Her next-door neighbor, and she doesn’t glance in acknowledgement, or even exchange a word?"
“Has she forgotten?"
She talks about forgetting, memory failures, aging, and all the things we miss when they appear not to be there, and I commiserate, even though there is always that look in her eye that says:
“You can’t know what I know; do not yet appreciate the entropy of another thirty years added to your limited experience.”
We talk of forgetfulness and mindfulness, and how they support or hinder the other.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
she says, as if she has a chunk of marinara-coated fettuccine on her forehead, or (even worse) that I was noticing the lack of some chunk of something inside her that should have been there.
I ask her if she realized that her neighbor (and friend) was seated across, and she replied:
“I don’t know who she is, but that’s Shirley Franklin—former Mayor of Atlanta—seated across from her. We’ve met on occasion”
and turns-back to her meatballs…
Turns-out it was I who had the proverbial "chunk of marinara-coated fettuccine on my forehead” ;)
The War between the gods of Fantasy and Fact is always magnificent, especially for the vanquished….
-- Café Lily (33.7753105, -84.3002167) 308 W Ponce de Leon Ave, Ste B, Decatur, Georgia 30030