Let's Have Lunch

My father made all the friends he ever needed in about the third grade.

That was approximately 75 years ago.








Real-life buddies, 1949

This group went to high school together (Class of '47). Many of them went to State U. two hours down the road together. They were frat brothers and each other's groomsmen. They bought houses in the same neighborhoods - heck, two of them lived on our street for 20 years.

No one moved away, and the years ticked by with various successes and failures.

Businesses were started and babies were born. Vacations were taken and anniversaries were celebrated. The Cleveland Browns won and lost and won and then usually lost. Then they moved to Baltimore, but the town got a new team, so my Dad and his friends dusted off their tickets and started over.

Kids grew up and then there were grandkids. Some of these guys retired. Some kept going, even though their feet hurt. The ones who invested well took winters off, as any good Clevelanders do, hightailing it to Boca or Palm Springs. But they returned in May.

Every Monday for the last 15 years or so, these guys had lunch. There was a core group: the restaurateur; the haberdasher; the ob/gyn; the concert promoter; a couple of salesman; the accountant; a bookie; an insurance guy (also a bookie); and some friends whose jobs I never knew, but they always drove nice cars.

They took turns picking the restaurant and paying. I liked to tease them, when I saw them, about the Olive Garden. Some of these guys were flush enough to order everything on the menu at any restaurant from New York to Vegas and never look at the bill. But once a month or so they went to the Olive Garden just because they liked it.

"You get breadsticks and salad! It's good!" one of them them explained to me.

My Dad was the first member of the Monday lunch club with spotty attendance. Six years ago, he had a stroke, which led to giving up his driver's license, as well as additional health problems. No matter, the restaurateur or the concert promoter picked him up and off they went. Even when it became tougher to speak and harder to follow a conversation, my Dad still looked forward to those lunches. Those guys could still make him laugh. That hadn't changed.

Eventually, Dad's troubles got bad enough he entered a nursing home. The lunch group officially "retired his number." Often, several of them stopped in on the way back from Monday lunch, bringing the party to him.

"It's kind of amazing," I said to my mother. "Not just that all of these men are still alive, but they still live in town and still run around together like high school ended two years ago."

"It is," said she of the blunt style. "But the next 10 years ain't gonna be fun."

In April, the OB/Gyn died. He was a nice man who delivered me, wrote me my first prescription for birth control pills and saw my mother through her first fight with breast cancer.

In July, the haberdasher died. I remember his store was once the place to get a leisure suit. It had long since closed.

Saturday, it was the restaurateur. He was still doing the hands-on, long hours of running a business until this year. My mom went out to lunch with him two weeks ago. Then his heart condition got the worst of him.

My Dad can't really leave the nursing home these days, so my mom - 11 years younger - makes the rounds of funerals and condolence calls. She hasn't told him the restaurateur died. She says she might not right away.

"What's it going to help anything?" she said.

True. The memory impaired can remember the old days. The recent past? Not so much. That's why at the nursing home they play big band music over the speakers and have "I Love Lucy" on the big screen.

My Dad can remember the street he grew up on but has trouble with whether he ate breakfast today. So no harm in not keeping him up to date. We will eventually.

If I were him, I would rather think it was 1964 anyway. Everyone was young. The Browns still had a chance. And no one had opened an Olive Garden yet.