Good Times

One Saturday Ed said he wanted to take me somewhere special for lunch, somewhere I had never been. We have always tried to make Saturday, the Sabbath, special and apart from the rest of the week. When the kids were growing up, Ed tried not to work on Saturday, and we usually took the kids to museums, the Botanic Gardens, the zoo or the library. It was a family day, and what we did was just a vehicle for our being together.

Now that our children are married with families of their own, Ed and I still try to observe the Sabbath by doing things we don’t ordinarily do during the week. So his announcement wasn’t that unusual, but it was apparent that he had put some thought into making this particular Sabbath special.

So I put on a decent pair of pants and a brand new, white T-shirt. I had been saving this recent purchase for a special
occasion since, for me, keeping white T-shirts white and unstained is not an easy task.

I have many once pristine T-shirts stacked in my drawer with at least one vague spot usually in the middle of my chest. I am reluctant to relegate them to the rag pile since, somewhere in my mind, I believe that the next time I reach for a shirt to wear, the spots will be gone. Of course, they never are.

A new white T-shirt is a treasure.
Ed kept our destination a secret. When he turned the car into the drive-through at a tiny Good Times hamburger restaurant, I asked, “This is the surprise?”

“You will be amazed at how good the food is,” my gourmet husband replied.

The restaurant was located on Colorado Boulevard, a major commercial thoroughfare that carries some of the heaviest traffic in Denver. Two tables were located on a narrow island of concrete between the drive in and drive out traffic lanes.

It was a warm, windy day, the blustery kind of wind that blows the blooms off your flowers and whips your hair into the frenzy of a fright wig.

“Welcome to Good Times,” said the woman leaning out of the window of the brightly colored structure. “May I take your order?”

“Good afternoon,” Ed replied. “I’ll have a Mighty Deluxe with Wild Fries and a Spoonbender and, the Lady will have a regular hamburger with fries and a diet coke.

The woman handed Ed our order. He parked the car and opened his door to get out.

“Where are you going?” I asked. “It’s too windy to eat outside. Besides, who wants to eat at one of those tables with the traffic whizzing by?”

“Come on,” he said, one foot out of the car, “I want you to have the complete experience.” He was resolute in his decision.

We fought our way through the wind and the traffic to the island where a woman was wiping off the tables.
“Is this the non-smoking section?” Ed asked her. The woman looked bewildered and sputtered something like, “It’s all non-smoking.”

I removed the hamburger and fries from the bag they had come in and unwrapped my hamburger while securing the bag with my elbow. The napkins had whipped out of the bag, carried by the gale force onto Colorado Boulevard and into the traffic.

I could feel my hair part down the front of my head and flatten against my ears. I lifted the burger off the paper, laden with gobs of ketchup and mustard that had seeped out of the bun. As I raised the burger to my lips, a sudden gust of wind lifted the paper off the table and, with an audible “thwack” pasted it to my body.

I sat motionless, not knowing whether to remove the paper or leave it attached to my chest, like a surgeon faced with the decision of removing a bullet that had lodged too close to a vital organ. I peeled the wrapper off of my once sparkling white T-shirt, now patterned with blotches of crimson and ochre. I hated Ed.

I looked up at him and saw that he knew he was in trouble. His eyes were open wide and he almost choked on the Might Deluxe that was in the process of mastication. I looked down at my chest, looked over at Ed, who had stopped chewing, opened my mouth and howled. I laughed, Ed laughed, we both laughed, and gasped, laughed and choked, our bodies rocking back and forth, side to side, with our hamburgers in hand.

He reached over with a napkin and, like the fine artist he is, began to wipe off the mess, smearing the condiments around my breasts, offering a little levity to the people driving in and out around us. We were still laughing when we finished our lunch and got into the car

Ed was right. It was a good hamburger, a surprise, and a complete experience. Everything he had promised. What a guy!

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