Mommy and Daddy's Special Day

        I can’t stop thinking about her.  Well--I suppose I should say ‘them’, as it technically was a rather large family.  However, it was the mother that most interested me.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Today I had lunch at the TGI Fridays at the intersection of Cedar Crest and Hamilton Boulevards.  It is important to note that it was lunch--around 12:30, in fact--and also important to note that it was a Wednesday.  The woman came in first, with her four sons, all between the ages of maybe seven years and eighteen months.  They were all wearing those short sleeve button down checked shirts that remind me of church for some reason, and all had very nice little crew cut hairdos.  The mother wore a long white lace dress--rather, a long white lace maternity dress, as she was very clearly quite pregnant with child number five.  This already made me sympathetic towards her, and I still sincerely hope that whoever she was, she gives birth sometime very soon to a baby girl.  

Shortly after the father arrived, and they all sat down to eat.  The children were very well behaved, and I didn’t really notice the table any more at all for quite some time.  There were snippets of conversation that drifted over.  The father telling the one child to STOP SCREAMING (I failed to point out the irony of this to him), and another rather loud ‘do you want to ruin mommy and daddy’s special day?’ interrogation of the same child.  This confirmed my suspicions that it was, in fact, a special day.  My friend leaned over to me and whispered “did they just get married”--to which I replied “I don’t think so” and in my head “I certainly hope not”.  The woman was, however, wearing the afore mentioned long white dress, complete with a tastefully small diamond cross pendant (which I judgmentally assumed had quite a bit to do with her urge to ‘go forth, be fruitful and multiply’) and she had clearly had her hair done in a very middle school dance fashion.  I wondered whether she did it herself very well or had it done professionally very poorly.  

The father ordered them both a glass of white zinfandel.  Yes, I said both, and she sipped hers slowly enough to make me think that it was a special treat, and that likely her unborn child would be just fine.  If she’d been swilling from a flask stashed under her maternity dress, that would have been a problem, but this clearly was part of the ‘special day’.

The cause for the specialness finally became clear when the father produced a card, which he proceeded to read out loud (I’m going to have to be honest here, at this point I was watching them like they were a reality television show).  It was their anniversary.  

I thought back to my last anniversary dinner only a few weeks ago, at Emeril’s in Las Vegas.  I wore a red dress my mother had bought for me because we saw it in a store window and it was on sale. Before dinner we went to see a Cirque du Soleil performance.  At the restaurant, we ordered the tasting menu complete with wine pairing.  It was fantastic.  An annoying woman took our picture and tried to sell us an entire album of them for an insane amount of money (we bought one picture for twenty bucks).  I had the best swordfish I’ve ever had.  I had the only swordfish I’ve ever had.  The banana cream pie was, as promised, exquisite--though I did think that the waiter was a bit pretentious and did not feel that the word ‘exquisite’ should be applied to something as mundane as banana cream pie.  But it was quite good.

This woman, in comparison, had to find a way to make her very pregnant self beautiful--and she was very pretty--while, I’m assuming, taking care of the four children she’d already borne.  She did her hair--or had it done, damn I wish I knew which one--steamed her dress, hooked her necklace, and got ready to go out for a romantic lunch date with her husband and four children to TGI Fridays at the intersection of Cedar Crest and Hamilton Boulevards.  At noon.  On a Wednesday.  In a long white dress with a diamond cross pendant.  And as a very special treat, she allowed herself one glass--of white zinfandel.  

Out of all of those thing, I think it is her choice of wine that makes me the most sad of all.