Dining with Family for 25 Blissful Years

      On occasions and time after time, there are moments where all the connections fire at once, sort of  like the neurons in your brain, when the light bulb comes on, or for instance when you get

a large gathering of family together to assault their taste buds at a place like Chinois, an Asian Bistro.

      Joyce and I had been there, deja vu, as you know, at least some of you, who read these convoluted charades, like first word, second syllable, that masquerade as Restaurant critiques, with our good friend Shayne Baker, on my 60th birthday this year.

       For the rest of the curious bystanders, like Bob Dusell,it was going to be following some arcane ritual of putting up with Asian or Chinese, as it were, food.  Though for myself, I couldn't

 quite see Bob turning down any type of food in particular, seeing as I thought he was a non-denominational type of culinary fanatic.  As Joyce says, I'm on the Seafood Diet, see food

 and eat it.
     So like so many of our excursions into the delights of culinary visions, we ordered ten or so items and passed them around to each of the gastronomical

 adventurers languishing at the table, hoping that at least a few of the offerings were not going to be sacrificial in nature. Skewers, curries, all types of meat,

 dumplings, tofu and various vegetables pranced in our mouths and uttered words of encouragement along the way, especially when the finish was a bit spicy for some of us.

      The group was finishing off celebrating Joyce and my 25 years of traveling the matrimonial conquests we had chosen, with or without the forks in the road, or the

 whiteouts, or the foggy resolutions that came with the original 13 states of equality between husband and wife.
      Margie and Bob gave us a memory box to place the momentary

repasts of yesteryear and the linear projections of the future happy trails we would travel to on foreign soils.
     The dessert had so many definitive tails to wag, that I  

 leave it up to all of you to conjure up those palatable flavors bursting in our mouths that came with the party that followed.
      So from all of mes, to all of yous,

this is Steven, the fumbling baboon, pulsating, enthusiastic embellisher from the time he was three, and was fiddling around with the snaps on the crib, so he could break out of there, and be found by the shore patrol, climbing on a street sign and make everyone frenetic, with his own language, smiling, laughing and dancing as if no one was listening or watching, I hope, and that's the way that it was, Child