Earlier this evening, I attended the wake of a family friend. Twenty-three years ago, my parents began a "Gourmet Club," a semiannual event where five couples collaborated on a menu and made an evening of the meal. Mom and Dad discovered the concept when they lived in Maryland. The East Coast being what it is, that club was enormous; my folks were a substitute couple and attended only one dinner in six years. Not so with this club: the objective was fine cuisine and happy times. They started with countries: France first, then every other country in Europe. Some Eastern and African cuisine was attempted, wherein my mother discovered some kind of Ethiopian soup to be the only foodstuff on the face of the planet she didn't exactly care for. As years passed, they simplified and settled on making delicious meals from wherever a recipe may have traveled.
Each of the five couples had children, and early on a Gourmet Club Picnic heralded the end of the summer - the memories are too profuse and fragmentary to list here, but through the wealth of them I can describe the personality and foibles of every one of us kids. Two couples' children were younger than my sister and I; the other two each had a pair of boys who were roughly our own ages. The two eldest boys were, as I remember, best of friends; and they were all precocious, smart, agile and inventive. I admired them. Picnics always came after great anticipation.
I occasionally played with the two sons of the woman for which this is written; the older son, two years older than me and a mechanical genius, was on my Odyssey of the Mind team in sixth grade. For the next year or so we struck up a congenial relationship, succeeding in making OM State Finals, playing on a softball team and happily trading computer games that now cannot be called anything but vintage.
In 1986, one of the couples - really, the husband and wife who were the consummate entertainers and succeeded in bridging the others - moved to Indianapolis. Dinners and picnics were never quite as lively again; but the club stayed together and the remaining couples' enjoyment of one another endured. Time passed. As everyone in the gourmet club, primaries and secondaries, grew older, the club met less often. Once the children were no longer children but independent high schoolers, the picnics ended. But the club's four couples met every so often, and the children, not really so close, still never forgot one another.
The friend passed away on Sunday after a struggle with cancer. My mother and I, phoned by the husband as they returned from a temporary stay in Michigan to their home here, were asked over to the house on Friday to help the wife into the house one last time. As I tried to explain to her sons tonight, I saw a lot of strength in her. It's no surprise: at her wake tonight were scores of people, long lines and a thoroughly jammed parking lot. It was a testament to the memory of a woman who will never be forgotten, whose family will not slip from prayers.