Company Coming

Does anybody go to visit family and friends on Sunday afternoons anymore? On the day of rest, this was a standard practice in my family. When I was a kid, we were always at somebody else's house on Sundays. You would have your big dinner around 1PM and then head over to see somebody or anybody. Invariably, you would stay right through supper, which usually consisted of cold cuts and potato salad.

Living in my grandmother's house, we got the reverse. She was the one getting the visitors. Around 2PM, the front door bell would ring, the dog would bark, and then one of my grandmother's relatives from the old country would walk in. They'd sit for the day, yakking it up in German. I would sit and listen to them, hoping to pick up a stray word of English here and there. If they were talking the latter and wanted to say something snarky about somebody in the family, they would flip back into German so I couldn't pick it up. Damn.

Now, my grandmother had this second cousin or niece named Adele. I'm not exactly sure what she really was, because, on a variety of occasions, my grandmother would refer to her as either one or the other. She was a Sunday visitor and presented a microcosm of the highs and lows of life. When you saw Adele getting off the bus and heading up the street to our house, your heart would race momentarily with exhileration. Adele always brought these home-baked raspberry squares, which must have had about four sticks of butter in them. To this day, they were the best things I ever tasted. But, Adele's visit also coincided with the ultimate in bad news. Because she was always there to give my grandmother a Toni Home Permanent. For the uneducated, this was all the rage in the 50s and 60s. You essentially put a ton of acid on your hair and then throw in these rollers that create curls that would rival Angela Davis. For some reason, my grandmother loved these treatments. And they stunk up the house. When you heard Adele walk through the front door, it was an immediate signal to me and my parents that all doors to my grandmother's end of the house must be hermetically sealed. Once, we forgot my dog was downstairs and she literally carried the smell with her for weeks.

The sweet and sour of memories. Whenever my doorbell rings on a Sunday, I get a little refreshing jolt.

Until, of course, I answer it and discover from some knucklehead how Jehovah can save the world.

Dinner last night: Pepperoni pizza at CPK.