Goodbye, and Ruby Tuesday

Today we laid Nana to rest, finally. She died last month, but there is a lengthy waiting list at Arlington Cemetery, for obvious reasons. Luckily for us, the wait is somewhat shorter if you are not active military or are a civilian. Even so, it has been a long month, waiting to be able to fully engage in the grieving process and move on.

She is smiling right now because of the fanfare bestowed on her today. My uncle is a retired police officer, and his good friends at the department honored Nana with a full police motorcade to Arlington. The kids...I say kids meaning the grandkids who are younger than myself, and they all are...all rode in a limo with my three kids. This was quite the big deal for Katie, Sean and Tommy, a police escorted limousine up I95, past the Pentagon, the memorials, into the majestic gates of Arlington Cemetery. The weather is gorgeous. The sun is shining brightly, the air is warm, Nana would be pleased.

As we were finishing the ceremony and standing around we decided to make lunch plans. My uncle said we should decide what restaurant to subject our crazy family to. He was on to something there!

We decided on Ruby Tuesday. I called ahead to tell them to expect a party of 16-18 people. "No problem ma'am, come on in!" was the cheerful reply I got. We got there and they had our tables all ready for us. This is where the readiness stopped. Our first red flag was a single waiter for 18 people. Personally, I could handle this size crowd and do it with a smile. But sometimes you enter a restaurant and sit down, and you know...you just know this is not going to go well. We knew. It was a disaster. The drinks alone took 10 minutes, we didn't order for another 10, and when the food finally started coming, it was sporadic and one or two dishes at a time. There were cold fries, forgotten orders, and some mysterious blue-gray substance on the buns. We were all having big discussions on what this could be. "It's plastic" said one, "No, no it's the ashes from the grill" said another. "You know what this is? This is the cleaner they use on the grill". The theories were flying, and we may never know because neither the waiter of the manager had any clue what it was. I took a bite of my delicious looking, piled high salad, and tasted musty, acrid and fizzy black olives. I went back for another salad and warned the waitress I passed on the way. She didn't seem concerned so I did my civic duty and stopped everyone at the salad bar from taking olives. Finally I gave up and removed them myself. Our poor waiter, he was sweating. He knew as well as we did, this was not going to work out in his favor. Then came the dreaded request- "can we see the manager please?" By now, everyone was fired up, everyone had a complaint, boy was this manager gonna get it! Then out walks the sweetest pregnant lady you ever saw, also sweating because she is down 2 cooks. By the way, this is why our waiter was so absent, he was also cooking. Great we said, how are we going to raise hell now? But things just got worse and worse, so Pat decided to go chat with her and our waiter. He calmly explained to her that he could list everything that was wrong, but suffice it to say that in our entire group, no one was satisfied. He said the only way to rectify this situation was to comp the entire bill. Her face immediately went all pregnant chick on him, but then he said these people have just come from a funeral. She said "ok, that is all I need to hear". 100% comp. Our waiter nearly cried when he was handed a healthy 15%+ tip. It really wasn't his fault, he has been waiting tables for just over a month, and can't be expected to wait tables and cook at the same time. Plus his dad used to be a cop, so that won him a few points with the cops in our group.

The cool thing was, we could have all been tense about it, to tell the truth some of us are wound pretty tightly. But even in the middle of a disastrous lunch, after returning from burying Nana, we were all just so content to be together, laughing and sharing memories. We left and stood outside talking and carrying on for another half hour. No one was worried about the service, or lack of it. No one was feeling sick from blue-gray buns or fizzy olives. (Not yet anyway, knock on wood.) And no one wanted to go home.

Still I'm gonna miss you...