Paterfamilias and I have taken to avoiding certain restaurants on Sunday nights. Usually Chinese. Usually filled with families.The orange beef and the shrimp with snow peas, the pork fried rice and the chicken with cashews fill a lazy susan that goes spinning around from the Bubbe and the Grandpa to the mother nursing an infant to the 8-year-old in a baseball cap. Oh, to have our children living close by. Oh, to be taking them out to dinner on a Sunday evening. Or having them over for a cookout. But our grown children and their children live in other cities that are too far away for a Sunday evening dinner.
Well, you can't have what you can't have. And we have Skype and phone calls and weekend visits every six weeks or so. It's not Sunday evening outings, but it will have to do.
I found solace in the chuckle in this tweet from a Twitterer named Aging Abundantly: "Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family -- in another city." George Burns. Burns was a vaudeville and radio comedian who lived to be funny well into the era of TV. {He lived to be 100.]. He personally missed out on Twitter, where he would have been one of the greats. So glad to see he's not being overlooked. And can still make us laugh at our human predicaments.
