January 6, 2021

Caesar Salad

I am down on the dock at the cottage with Danna and her friend Sally and they are trading blind date war stories. It really is a bit of a joke.

To begin with, ‘blind’ is such a misnomer that it is laughable. This generation has seen more pictures of their prospective dates than I have of my entire family collectively. When we went in blind, we really went in blind. Armed with no more, especially if the set up was from a female friend, than weathered adjectives about bubbly personalities and shared interests, and creatively ambitious promises about looks. “She looks a lot like Demi Moore,” the wife might say while her husband bit his lip and stared downward at a fascinating piece of grass. I suspect tall tales were also told about me. I went on a lot of blind dates with women who, upon opening the front door, were completely unable to mask their disappointment. I saw a lot of the “Oh socks, I really needed socks” Christmas present look. A date most surely over before it had even begun, but now there would be two hours of forced conversation, “Do you like to travel? I love to travel”, over plates of baked salmon and asparagus to look forward to. Then a perfunctory follow up phone call two days later in the quixotic hope that you completely misread the situation and that her look of only slightly contained nausea was in fact just one of concealed excitement.

These kids today have no clue. Nor any inkling of grammar or vocabulary. No need for a crack forensic team to decode a message on an answering machine.

Now they have emojis.

An emoji which takes care of sending a direct and unambiguous message about every situation. Should you be ambitious and take advantage of the richness of the English language, you might write ‘s’up.’ Or, really dig deep into the well of words and type out a real tome - ‘Netflix and chill.’ Complete words and sentences are becoming rarer than a lunar eclipse.

“Now if I had access to text back in the day,” I mused out loud.

I was not saying I could have done better. I was just saying I could not have done worse.

Danna’s friend Sally, she actually does look a little like Demi Moore, asks if I have any blind date stories, and Danna rolls her eyes and says “He has a whole book of them.” Which is true. I have written plenty of stories about blind dates.

“Tell the Caesar salad story,” says Danna.

“It’s a blind date story?” Asks Sally.

“Yes,” chimes in Danna. “It is epic. Tell her who set you up.”

I had forgotten about that. The phone number had come from my Tante Odette in Montreal. She called me every week for two months. I finally relented on week 9.

“Tonto,” I say, referring to the nickname my family and all our friends call her.

“Tonto!” Says Sally who, having been friends with Danna since grade school, has an intimate knowledge of all of the members of our whacky family. “Oh, this is going to be good.

I get up and help myself to a couple of clementines from a bowl we have been sharing, cavalierly throwing the rinds into the trees behind us, assuming they are biodegradable. I return to my chair but not before first dragging it to a lonely square of shade I have found precariously close to the end of the dock

I toss a clementine to Sally. She and Danna, unlike me, have angled their lounge chairs in order to get the most of the late afternoon sun.

“Actually, the shocking part is that it was a good set up. Tonto played cards with a woman whose niece had just moved to Toronto.”

“So you called her?”

“Yeah. But you have to understand it wasn’t so straight forward. You had to find a good time to call and you couldn’t just leave a message on the answering machine.”

“Why not?”

“It just wasn’t done. The first call had to be live. I think I hung up five times on the machine before I got through to her.”

“That is jokes.”

“No. What is jokes is she had never heard of me. She had no idea I was going to call. It took fifteen minutes before we could figure out the connection. I was surprised she even agreed to go out with me.”

“Classic Tonto,” says Danna.

“Why is it called the Caesar salad story?” Asks Sally.

I smile and answer.

“We went out for dinner and she ordered Caesar salad for an appetizer and Caesar salad with chicken as her main.”

“Seriously?” Asks Sally.

“Yes,” I reply.

“That’s a true story?”

“Yup.”

“That’s a lot of garlic,” says Sally. “Are you sure she wasn’t trying to tell you something?”

“Maybe. But she went out with me twice more.”

“The story gets better,” pipes in Danna.

It is true. The story is much longer. But I don’t like to tell it.

I suppose there are only so many stories but we writers always want to think we are coming up with something new and clever. Sometimes I choose not to tell a story, or at least not include it in a collection, because it seems a little too derivative. That is true of the Caesar salad story because the longer version is actually the ‘the time I forgot my date’s name’ story and it sounds all too much like the classic Seinfeld ‘Mulva’ episode. I think it is a pretty good story and is really, beyond the forgetting of the name, really nothing like the ‘Mulva’ episode, but on occasion, when I tell it, someone will say “Oh, just like the Seinfeld episode,” or worse, “Did you base that on the Seinfeld episode?” And I don’t really want to explain why it is different because the story is kind of ruined by then.

“This I gotta hear,” says Sally.

So I tell the rest of the story.

Now I don’t know how old I was when this happened but it doesn’t really matter because there was never a time when I wasn’t childish, immature, and juvenile and there was never a time when I didn’t surround myself with friends who were also childish, immature and juvenile. And because we, Allie, Lewberg, Goldfarb, and I were childish, immature and juvenile, during the days between date one and date two and the days between date two and date three, we didn’t call this woman by her given name.

Instead we called her Caesar salad.

As in “Where are you taking Caesar salad?”

Or:

“What time are you picking up Caesar salad?”

This woman, whose name will most assuredly come to me before I get to the end of this story, came to her nickname honestly. She ordered Caesar salad all three times we went out.

“Once at a Chinese restaurant,” says Danna, stealing the thunder of my mid-story joke. It isn’t true, of course. It is a fictional detail which found its way into the story and, as it does here, usually gets a big laugh and so earned its place in subsequent telling. It is a little unfair because, other than her unusual penchant for Caesar salad, she was funny, attractive, and very nice.

Date three was at the Dip on College Street. I didn’t tell Lewberg, Goldfarb, or Allie where I was taking Caesar salad on our third date because I didn’t put it past any of them to come snooping by, so it was likely a complete coincidence, although the patio at Cafe Diplomatico was one of my go-to places, when Lewberg suddenly appeared on College Street making his way to the corner of Clinton where she and I were sitting.

He was about fifteen feet away when I realized I had forgotten her actual name. We had used her nickname so often it had become lodged in my brain. Which sent me into an understandable panic.

When Lewberg got to our table, smiling at his good fortune for having discovered us, I looked up at him and said, mind you, to someone I had known for most of my adult life, “I’m terribly embarrassed but I have forgotten your name.”

And Lewberg, unfazed or perhaps bolstered, by the number of Ketel and crans he had already consumed that night, had the good sense to stick out his hand and say “Lewberg. Nice to meet you.”

Then she shook his hand and said “Sandra, so nice to meet you.”

Then I said “Oh right, Lewberg. Of course, Lewberg. I am so sorry.”

But what I meant to say was:

“Oh Right. Sandra. Sandra. Sandra. Not Caesar salad.”

Then Lewberg, who is as solid a wing man as one could ask for, declined my offer to join us. Which may have been the one and only time he has ever turned down a drink.

“I love that part Uncle Ronnie,” says Danna. “I have to give you credit. That was pretty smart.”

“Yes,” agrees Sally. “That was a baller move. Then what happened?”

“We went back to my apartment.”

That’s what we did. We went back to my apartment. I excused myself and went to the bathroom. I left Sandra in the living room where I had a fireplace. The fireplace had a wide mantle.

I don’t keep that many pictures on my mantle. I have a few of my parents, my brother, my sister, my nephews and nieces. There is a picture of Sammy and I when I published No Nuts for Me. And a really nice group one from Pebble Beach from the time I got my hole in one.

Four of us.

The Pacific Ocean in the background.

Me.

Avram Kashitsky.

Goldfarb.

and Lewberg.

Lewberg.

That was the picture Sandra was holding in her hand when I came out of the bathroom in my apartment.

“Isn’t that Lewberg?” She said.

“Omg!” Says Sally. “No way.”

I say “Way.”

“I guess you didn’t go out with her again.”

“Nope.”

“Great story,” she says. She gets up and heaves the clementine rinds into the trees then nudges the lounge chair with her knee in order to better greet the sun. My shade has shifted but I am too lazy to move my chair. Anyway, the sun feels good and the three of us soak it up without speaking.

And then Sally breaks the silence “You know,” she says, “it kinda reminds me of that Seinfeld episode.”

The end.