Angels and Alpha-bits

While my mother was in the hospital for a month or more, my father, sister and I were invited by well-meaning friends and neighbors to dinner.  An ambulance on Angus Street was unheard of, and everyone seemed to know that my mother was ill and that my father had the two small girls to handle on his own.

Directly next door were a childless couple named Mac and Doris.  He owned some sort of business and she was his secretary. They had a poodle named Tammy and cocker spaniel named Shane. Movies were obviously a big source of dog names for them. I loved the cocker spaniel and my sister went for the poodle

Mac may have had a stroke, because he could not use one of his arms and walked with a limp. Or maybe he’d been injured in the war.  No one talked about it. They smoked and drank and owned a yacht that was kept at the Balboa Yacht Basin. To me they were rather glamorous.

Our dinner with them was at once odd and comfortable.  We usually only saw Mac and Doris for a party of some sort and their annual New Year’s Eve party.  Doris’ elderly parents always came and stayed in the chilly apartment they had on their lower floor.  There would be kids, Doris’s sister trying to dance the Twist and platters of walnuts with nutcrackers. People smoked cigarettes and cigars and drank cocktails.  Not like at my house where cranberry juice was the holiday libation.

The night they had us for dinner, a school night, Doris served us home made chicken noodle soup, which in itself was a novelty. But it was the big, black peppercorns floating amid the wide noodles that grabbed my attention.  I had never before seen a whole peppercorn and, oblivious to the fact that I was breathing in plenty of second hand smoke, I really enjoyed that soup.

The invitations for dinners started pouring in.  Dad knew we had to bring a gift to each and came up with a typical Al Smithson solution.  He bought pre-made angel food cakes, which we “frosted” with whipped cream.  Then we opened boxes of Alpha-bits cereal—a new item on the market—from which we picked out the sticky letters to spell THANK YOU and the names of that particular evening’s host and hostess set gently on to the top of the cakes.  The three of us got pretty good at the routine of decorating our cakes and thought we were pretty slick.