austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,
austin_dern
austin_dern

So don't ask me will I explain

Tuesday my brother (the married one) called me at work to suggest getting together for lunch Thursday since he was going to be in town for a while and could arrange that to be near lunch. That seemed like a good idea to me, and he promised to get back to me with more specific plans. I expected to come home Tuesday or Wednesday to my father insisting I had to call him right this second, but there wasn't anything, and by the time they were placing the lunch orders downstairs Thursday I wondered if he'd been unable to come or call after all. But he was in the area, just running a little late, and so that's what I did for lunch.

He didn't plan on going to any particular restaurant, and neither did I, so we ended up getting sandwiches from the deli I usually go to. By luck they had kielbasa (the owner doesn't always have or feel like offering it); this suited us very nicely too. While waiting for the kielbasa to cook, he got called by our other brother, who was down in Baltimore for a job interview, with one in New York City scheduled for Friday. (The one who'd gone to Chicago for an interview, then aimed for Madison, Wisconsin, which got him to Worcester, Massachusetts.) The interview went great, he reports, and it turned out he had only Wednesday got the Baltimore interview for Thursday. This made me realize he had been lying about having a job interview keeping him from driving my parents to the airport Thursday. No, apparently, he'd thought his New York City interview was Thursday when our parents asked for a ride. But then they asked if he could come in Friday instead and he agreed before remembering he had a Baltimore interview on Friday. So he called the Baltimore people and they were glad to have him come in Thursday, which had been the original date anyway before he'd got it swapped with New York City a couple weeks ago. So he sincerely thought he had an interview although it wasn't the interview he thought he had until it became the one he couldn't drive our parents to the airport for. I understand that other families don't have things like this happen. Also he wondered how long the two of us would be at lunch, because he'd like to join us, clearly having forgotten that he was three to four state borders away and we weren't eating that big a meal.

Also it transpired that my brother and his wife were never asked about providing an airport trip, which was particularly strange since my sister-in-law hasn't returned to work full-time yet and could easily schedule things. Apparently two-year-olds count, in my parents' mind, as a complete pass against airport chores. My brother wondered if they'd asked our sister or her husband, but the last I'd heard my parents were renting a car to drive from home (there's a rental agency less than a mile away from here) to the airport. Sorting all this out took up surprising amounts of time during lunch, suggesting the family could stand to give one another more regular updates about who is doing what. But we had a fine time, and my brother --- who worked at this company briefly, and who was the main contact person for a customer for years before that --- got to catch up with several old friends, and all was successful.

When I got home, the parents' Toyota Something was missing. I assume it's with my sister and her husband and that they drove my parents up, as otherwise I should really have notified the police about the excessive quantity of driveway in the driveway.

Trivia: W C Fields's second short for Mack Sennett studios was The Fatal Glass Of Beer, based on a sketch Fields had done in Earl Carroll's Varieties show of 1928 named ``The Stolen Bonds''. Source: Keystone: The Life And Clowns Of Mack Sennett, Simon Louvish.

Currently Reading: Psychohistorical Crisis, Donald Kingsbury.

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