Dad gets antsy in the evening. “I suppose we ought to go for a drive,” he says. He has traipsed around Durham earlier in the day, so we head to Chapel Hill. Neither of us is hungry yet. We park and stroll down Franklin. Watch people. Look in windows. Survey the scene.
I point. “Wow, look at those azaleas! Gorgeous!”
“Yeah,” Dad says appreciatively, “they have all that floral shit over here.”
Eventually, we get an outside table at Tallula’s, a Turkish place I used to go to back in the day. Dad asks for the lamb kebab. I order the sea bass special.
I eat it quickly. Dad looks at my empty plate. “Must’ve been good, run-over or not.”
“It was delicious,” I say. “How’s your kebab?
“Adequate.”
He keeps eating.
“I’ve had worse.”
A few more bites.
“In England, at a Cypriot restaurant. Tasted like braised donkey butt.”
Five more forkfuls.
“This just might’ve been left over from last night.”
He finishes it.
The check comes. Dad looks at the total. “That’s not bad. The bread was good. So was your crushed fish.”
On the way home, Dad narrates all the changes in the landscape over the last 30-odd years.
“How long has that Red Roof Inn been there?!…
I remember when they were building I-40 through here…
That place used to be a small Volkswagen dealership…
(and then waving his hand toward a sea of headstones) They‘ve been there a while, I guess.”
Rarely does my dad laugh at the things that make me laugh because they’re not jokes to him—they’re just his thoughts. But that last one. That last one made us both crack up.