This evening, I ventured to the Hebrew Home, as I usually do on Tuesday nights, for dinner with our favorite Purple Heart winner. Before my father’s red snapper arrived at the table ( and, if you remember, he only eats fish because he’s “done with the meats”), I brought him a salad from the salad bar without the “grass” — lettuce if you’re new to these parts. The plate consisted of a hardboiled egg, tuna salad, corn, tomatoes, and cold carrots.
“Why is it,” he asks our old friend Chelsea, who happened to stop by, “when I eat carrots, I feel like I’m breaking a window?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wait till I call my lawyer.”
“As soon as he gets out of jail,” she responds because she’s heard this bit 16,487 times since he moved in to the Hebrew Home.
“As soon as he gets out of jail,” my father says, unconcerned that Chelsea has stepped on his punchline. “How goes your life?”
“It’s good Jack.”
“Just wait —” he starts to say, when Chelsea, who has clearly been studying for her Jack Friedman Final, responds, “It’ll get worse.”
“It’ll get better,” he says.
“Better? That’s not how the jokes goes,” Chelsea says, laughing.
A woman far away in another part of the dining room also starts chuckling.
“He does this every night,” she says, smiling.
“Come on over,” I say, waving to her. “Plenty of room.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“How do you know her?” my father asks me.
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