Titles, Inc.

A Car Wash With an Attitude

Talk about Promotion.  Talk about Merchandising.  Talk about Good Will.  Talk about Smart.

On my rare Saturday off from the shop I joined Art on his regular Saturday morning ritual.  His Lexus dealer offers a free car wash and lox and bagels from 8:30AM till noon.  Free car wash any morning, but bagels only on Saturday.   Art’s car is the sparkly one in our driveway.  Mine is parked under the trees and covered with bird doo-doo.  Mine needs that car wash, but Mercury doesn’t offer it.

We drive into this huge auto dealership and join the long line inching forward to the car wash.  We reach the large telephone booth-like structure, and a young lady comes out to look inside the front door for a code which she then punched into her computer, coming back with two receipts: she slaps one onto the windshield and hands the driver the other. We glide along to the car wash unit and exit.

We enter a long corridor leading to manned counters where we exchange our piece of paper for two theater tickets  We cross the courtyard to a huge room filled with long tables, about twelve of them, with people seated around them cafeteria style.  We line up at the serving tables where in exchange for our ticket we are offered a choice of bagel (whole wheat for Art, all-season for me) little cream cheese thingees, slices of salmon laid on the bagel, a serving of lox-egg salad, next an offering of tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, followed by a display of a wide variety of yummy sweets.  Then little cups of fresh fruit, and sealed containers of fruit juices.

FREE. 

You are thinking, if you bought a Lexus you can afford to pay for this sumptuous brunch. Yes, indeedy.  But who doesn’t love FREE.  There were families with children (one little Asian girl had peanut butter on her bagel), the man opposite us in his tee shirt with a large printed CCCP was talking in an unfamiliar language to his little family. 

When they left a woman sat down and chatted with us.  She drives up to this suburb from the city.  She visited Lexus dealers in Chicago, but these people, she said, were so pleasant to work with, and the Saturday brunch is a nice diversion.  Her daughter is now living in New Zealand so we took her name to give to a friend of ours planning to move there shortly.  I go back for that piece of chocolate cake I had resisted the first time around.  Others were refilling coffee cups.  There was no tea.

When we left the dining room we returned to the counter where we exchanged our last ticket to retrieve the car.  I asked the man how many cars they service on a Saturday.  He said, “About 600.”  “And how many meals do you serve?”  He said the caterers are prepared for 500 people.  “I thought there would be more – I saw families spilling out of their cars.”  He said, “Not everybody eats.  Some people wait in the lounge.”  Really?  Some people choose to watch TV over that sweet table?

I can understand why the ad for Bredemann Lexus Dealer brags that he is “The Only Dealer in Illinois To Win Lexus’ Highest Customer Satisfaction Award 16 Years In A Row!”  This is a free testimonial from me.  I am cheaply bought.  Just feed me.

---Florence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

               

Food For Thought

Two evenings, two association dinners.  Two Yuchhs.

For the first dinner event we were asked our preferences.  I chose steak over the whitefish or veal parmesan.  Although it sure looked good, I had a little trouble cutting through it.  Then I chewed and chewed and chewed.  I watched another steak eater; his jaw muscles were equal to the task.  I caught the eye of the other steak person and exaggerated the pantomime of chewing.  He advised, “Slice it very thin and cut the thin slices even smaller.”  With this task at hand I figured I’d still be eating while everyone was on dessert.

I worked clumsily at trying for paper thin slices.  My noble husband picked up my dish with its almost intact slab of meat, went into the kitchen and came out with fish, bless him.  The dessert was a ball of vary-colored ice cream.

Second event.  We were at a table of ten, our guests, all.  After salad I asked Art whether he had gotten everyone’s meat, fish, chicken orders in.  He said the invitation didn’t specify.  No?  Really?  Did he miss something?  Here comes the waitress with her cart, and she passes each person a dish with three slices of tan meat.  “What is it?” I ask. She says, “Pork.”   Pork?  Pork?  (At a restaurant with friends, do you recall anyone ordering pork?  Wait, have you ever seen pork on a menu?  Is it Politically Correct to assume that in a crowd of 150, pork is not suspect?) )  I tell the waitress, “I don’t want pork.”  She understands, but I don’t understand when she says, “Only pork.  Everybody for pork.  In kitchen only pork.”

I reluctantly attack it.  The rice, mixed wild and white, is nice.  The par-boiled carrots are nice.  Art catches the server’s attention and saws his knife through the air so she brings back a steak knife.  Len leans back with his arms crossed against his chest.  “The pork is awful, the rice is awful, the carrots are awful.”  An afterthought, “The food is awful but the company is good.”  

His obstinacy pays off.  The attentive waitress removes his plate and replaces it with salmon. “Me too, me too,” howls Stu.  She takes his platter away, and brings back salmon.  I attack his plate.  We even let Barry take a tiny bite.  This is a reunion of retired Army Air Force men, many of them too frail to chomp on anything more substantial than mashed potatoes.  Pork, indeed.  The dessert is chocolate cake.  A wit at our table asks, German Chocolate Cake? 

Through the rest of the evening, during the interminable documentary, I keep muttering, “Who serves pork at a banquet?”   

The event planner lives in New Orleans.  Is it a Louisiana thing?

---Florence

The New Family

He looked exuberant, better than when I had seen him at his last visit to the shop over two years ago.  I said, “It’s been a long time.”  He said, happily, “So much has happened, and it’s all good.” 

He said, “I have three babies!”  OK, here I exercised caution because I had made a fuss over a young man only a few days earlier who talked effusively about his new baby, and when he left another  customer told me, “I don’t think you understood he was talking about his new puppy.”

“Uh, three babies?  Tell me about the babies,” I say politely.  He says joyfully, “Three little girls!”

Let me put this in chronological order instead of scattered piecemeal as I got it. 

First, he has a new wonderful partner.  Next, they wanted children, so my customer/friend used his sperm, got a donated egg, found a surrogate mother and Oh joy, a baby girl is born.  

They were so happy with their little family, they formalized it with a religious wedding ceremony combined with a baby naming ceremony.  The wedding was in a church, officiated by a Rabbi and an Episcopalian priest.  Although same sex weddings aren’t recognized in Illinois, they wanted to experience it for their own spirituality.  The wedding and party afterward was a small family affair.  My friend was embraced by his parents, his new step-father, his siblings.  His partner's family included his former wife, and his loving children, now young adults - two girls and a boy ages 22, 25, and 27.  They all celebrated this new union.

The couple's new family life with their darling infant gave them so much pleasure, they considered the saved frozen sperm and elected to repeat the process with the same egg donor and surrogate carrier.  To their enormous delight, this new birth produced twin girls.  The big sister is 18 months old.

My friend is the stay-at-home parent.  He is an art consultant and a home office serves him well.  His partner is a professor who drives to his university in a bordering state, and has arranged his classes to fall on three days in the middle of the week, so that he is at home for the rest of the week.  They moved out of their city condo to a house in the suburbs.

I  am looking forward to meeting the entire family.   Don’t you love happy stories?

 ---Florence