How you deal with food can affect who you become. So be careful how you handle it.

 

What you experience in a restaurant can change your life. Let me share with you some . . .

 

 

Food For Thought

 

     As a very active boy, living on Long Island, I thought a lot about food. My parents believed I’d eat them out of house and home. Midnight snacks became my passion. My mother threatened to put a lock on the refrigerator.

     I was about ten, when restaurants became a family thing. At least twice a month, we’d visit the local Italian restaurant, Luna’s. The food was amazing.

     One evening, we sat at the restaurant table, and Dad looked at me and asked, “What would you like for dinner tonight?”

     I’d reply, “Everything.”

     “You can’t have everything,” he’d say, with a twinkle in his eye. “For one, even you couldn’t eat it all. And second, you’d have to stay, after we finish eating, to wash dishes so we could pay for your meal.”

     “You’re kidding, aren’t you?” I’d inquire, with a quiver in my voice.

     He’d look at the waiter, who’d become a “personal family friend,” since he’d served us over twenty times, and say, “Am I?”

     This was all probably a set-up, but I was too young to realize it. The waiter would smile, pull an apron out from behind his back, drape it over me, and say, “See you in the kitchen after dinner.”

     “No way!” I’d yell. This little show took place more than once, and the other restaurant patrons would giggle and smile.

     My parents went to other restaurants with friends and developed a taste for Chinese food. I was eleven, and on a Saturday evening in April, when we‘d usually go to Luna’s, Dad told my sister and me to get ready to go to a new restaurant. I looked at him and asked, “What kind of pasta do they have?”

     “Chow mein,” he said.

     “I never saw that on Luna’s menu,” I stated, somewhat confused.

     “That’s because this is a Chinese restaurant. It’ll be good to try something different.”

     “Nooooo,” my sister and I said in unison.

     Well, we had no choice. We entered China Palace and were ushered to a table. Both of us held our nose, because the smell was awful. After we were seated, the waiter placed a children’s menu in front of my sister and me. We ignored it.

     Mom looked across the table at us and said, “If you want to eat, you have to make a decision about what you would like to order.”

     My sister and I seemed to be on the same page. We knew we couldn’t have Italian, so, without opening the menu, we both stated, emphatically, “A hamburger and fries.”

     Mom laughed. “I guess you’re going to go home hungry tonight,” she said.

     The waiter approached and asked, “Are you ready to order?”

     “As ready as we can be,” Mom stated. “I’d like the Chicken Chow Mein.”

     “And I’ll have the Shrimp Chow Mein with a side of the House Special Fried Rice,” Dad declared, enthusiastically.

     The waiter turned to my sister and me. We didn’t say anything, at first. But then, with a smirk on my face, I blurted, “I’ll have a hamburger and fries.”

     “Me, too,” my sister shouted.    

     If looks could kill, my mother would have been arrested for committing a double homicide. But what happened next amazed all of us.

     The waiter asked, “How many packets of ketchup would you like with your burger and fries?”

     Mom stared at him in total shock. ”Do you have to go across the street to Sam’s Diner to get the meals?” she queried.

     “Huh. No. Children’s Menu—top of the second page.”

     Apparently we weren’t the only kids who didn’t want Chinese food.

     When I was fifteen, I got my first job, as a waiter in the restaurant at a summer, overnight camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York. I waited on the two senior girls tables, composed of thirteen and fourteen year old young ladies. This was an amazing job, and I went out of my way to impress my “customers.”

     I took my time getting their orders from the kitchen, wanting to make sure each was correct. As such, I always was the last waiter to bring the meals out, but they always were right.

     Sally would yell, “Hey, waiter boy,” are we going to have lunch or do we call it dinner?”

     “And will dinner be our midnight snack?” Marlene would shout.

     Well, I took this punishment for the first four weeks of camp. Then something totally unexpected happened. At lunchtime, the beginning of the fifth week, I came out of the kitchen, into an arena of dead silence.

     What I saw bewildered me. Patty, a girl from one of my tables, sat at the piano in the corner of the room. She began to play the music for the song “Tall Paul,” made famous by Walt Disney Mouseketeer, Annette Funicello.

     Carrying my food tray, I started to approach my tables. What happened next blew me away. All the girls stood and began to sing a song to the music, but it wasn’t “Tall Paul.” It was one they’d written about me, called “Slolowe.” It went like this—

 

"Dishes on the table,

food on the floor,

Alan’s our waiter,

we adore.

Slolowe, slolowe,

oh, no,

he don’t go.”

 

     At the time, I didn’t know if this was a good thing or a monstrous put down. I knew I was slow, but I did it to make sure I brought them exactly what they wanted. Why did they have to make a big deal of it, I thought.

     Something like this usually disappears at summer’s end. It doesn’t go home with you, unless you want it to. However, my sister sat at the twelve-year-old girls table, and she’s never let me forget it. And so, I became “slolowe” forever.

     Today, I embrace it and share it with the world, as slolowe@icloud.com.

I also am a pasta freak and eat Chinese food, on occasion, but have stepped away from hamburgers and fries—just some food for thought.

 

 

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