grandmother

It's an odd thing, but one of the best dim sum restaurants I've ever eaten at happens to be in Bellevue, Washington, a short fifteen minute walk away from my mother's house.

The restaurant is called Top Gun, and it opened in a little, out-of-the-way place right off of Factoria. For someone who has the cream of cuisine available at the fingertips in the Bay Area, it's a disconcerting thing to discover that one of the best suppliers of one of one's favorite types of food is living in the wilds of Podunkdom.

The great thing about Top Gun, even greater than the food (which is in itself pretty damn impressive, being far better than anything I've yet to taste in San Francisco's thriving and creatively unsanitary Chinatown), is the fact that the waiters, having come from the aggressively civilized Eastside, are. . .

. . . get ready for this . . .

Polite.

They really are.

They're polite.

In fact, they're not only polite, they're nice.

In Chinatown, back when I lived next to the Chicken Family, there's a restaurant called Four Seas that I used to go to on an irregular basis. Not because the food was good, mind. No, the reason I went to Four Seas was to see if the waiters could be any ruder than the last time I went in. Every time I went in expecting to be disappointed, and every time they exceeded expectation. The level of service not provided at this restaurant had reached a level of artistry unmatched by Church tithe gatherers during the Spanish Inquisition. I can't read Chinese so I can't be certain, but I'm pretty sure the characters behind the reception desk read: "Dine with us and we'll spit on your memory."

A Chinese friend of mine had once explained the stereotypical rude Chinese waiter syndrome to me. "It's not a stereotype," she said, kindly. "It's true. Chinese waiters don't really have any motivation to be nice to you. The pay sucks, the work sucks, the customers suck, so the thinking goes, why shouldn't they make your meal suck?"

"Do they actually hawk into my food before they serve it?" I asked.

The way back to the house is a meandering, slow progress; I match paces with my four-foot tall grandmother, while my mother zips on ahead, impatient with her urge to exercise. We trace a twisted path through the mall that interferes with a crow's flight path. In the lobby, while my mother and grandmother argue over which of them gets to hold the door open for the other, I make a brief cell phone call to the Guy.

"What're you wearing?" I say by way of greeting, lacking inspiration for anything more witty.

"Not much," he says, frankly.

Cell phones are dangerous things.

The last mile back home was spent side-by-side with my grandmother, keeping her company while my mom sprinted back home with morsels of food from the restaurant. She'd prepare it for the ancestors, laying it all out on a lacquered tray with a miniature glass bottle of warmed milk for the baby that died between my sister and me.

My grandmother commented on everything, breathless though she was by the walking. My old neighborhood isn't as hilly as San Francisco is, but it's hilly enough for an 80-year old woman. Even with full lungs, she was difficult to understand. Her English skills were nonexistent; as I've mentioned before, her Japanese was the kind that used to manipulate generals and the law of the nation, not converse with granddaughters who learned their Japanese from Doraemon comic books and old Japanese samurai flicks.

"Look, moles," she said, pointing out one of the neighbor's yards. Sure enough, a little semi-circle of mole hills was interrupting the smooth flow of grass.

We passed one driveway that was, in defiance of all anti-White-Trash rules, filled to overflowing with junkers and a massive, battered pick-up truck. I tsked my tongue, clucking like an old hen in disapproval. "Look at that. Bad driver."

My grandmother peered short-sightedly at the truck, then tottered a little closer to investigate. I had a brief, irrational worry that the owner of the pick-up truck would come charging out in red flannel to shoo us away with a shotgun and a basset hound. Surely not.

"It looks like my car," she marveled, and pointed, proudly. "To-yo-ta."

I gently steered her away from the house -- the realization that one of the cars in the driveway was a mobile home put the proverbial wings on my feet -- and set her back on the path to home. "You drive a pick-up truck?" I asked, baffled.

The little grey head shook. "No no. It has a great deal of damage, like my car. It has bumps and scrapes and scratches, my car, but I have never been in an accident."

I've heard about my grandmother's driving. There are some things too terrible for even my mother to keep to herself.

"It's the ditch," my grandmother says, bobbing her head back and forth. "Because I have to back out of the field and the road is so narrow, I sometimes go into the ditch."

"Forty miles an hour in half a minute," my mother told me when she got back from Japan on a visit to her mother. "She put the car in reverse, didn't even look into the rearview mirror, and pulled out of the house. I didn't even have time to scream."

"It's not a deep ditch, but the road is a little bit narrow" my grandmother explains, and is suddenly distracted by a pair of very big, very ugly birds staring malevolently at us from the curb. "Cute. . . "

"She almost killed us. We went backwards into the irrigation ditch. The front wheels weren't even touching the ground and she still had the pedal down. I had to jump out of the car."

"It's only that the road is so narrow," my grandmother finishes, pottering towards the curb to try to pet the birds. I wave them hastily away. They probably have rabies.

"The neighbor came and had to tow us out. Apparently, he does it three, sometimes four times a week. She doesn't know how to use the brake, so she goes around corners at the same speed that she does for the streets. She hits everything. Everything. Traffic cones, poles, walls, everything. The only things she doesn't hit are people and animals. I don't understand how she does it."

"I'm not a very good driver," my grandmother says, a bit apologetically. She inspects the yards that we pass, pointing to the ones on the other side of the road for my examination, which she insists be thorough and careful. "Do you see your mother's shoe, anywhere?"

"Even your father doesn't drive that badly," my mother said, fiercely. "And he's bad."

My mother woke up in the morning two days before and found two dogs cavorting in her backyard. "Brack and white," she explained in her creative English. "They were so cute, but digging up ther garden so I . . ."

She broke off and finished in Japanese. ". . .had to go out and ask them how they came in, but they wouldn't show me. So I told them to go away and shooed them out to the front yard. One of them," she added, indignantly, "took my shoe. I found it in the neighbor's yard later."

My mother is an avid gardener, and a less avid housekeeper. Her conscience in the latter department keeps the gardening sneakers outside, and the everyday sneakers inside. Everything has its proper place, after all. When we came back from mochitsuki, we discovered only one shoe outside the front door.

Mom stopped dead and stared at the single shoe that was left. "The DOGS," she sputtered.

My grandmother peered at the leftover shoe and wagged her curly grey head. "Why did you leave them outside?" she wondered.

"I didn't see them this morning," my mother fumed. "I got the shoe back yesterday, so I thought it would be fine."

I grinned. "They probably figure they're playing hide and seek," I suggested. "You're it."

"You probably shouldn't have left the shoes out," my grandmother said, gently skirting the borders of the critical.

Me, I was more blunt. "Stupid thing to do."

"My shoe!" Mom wailed, and that was it.

After getting back from Top Gun, I trundled Mom's kerosene tank around to the side of the house to fill it from the massive drum kept in a shed against the house wall. A high wooden fence separates our yard from our neighbors', a young couple from Mercer Island who haven't yet won the unconditional approval of the Snyders down the street and therefore haven't yet gained admittance into the mystique of Mockingbird Hill.

There was something whining behind the fence, and a scratching. I put down the kerosene tank and peered through the molding fence slats. Two puppes, one white, one black, were scrabbling at the wood, whimpering hopefully at me.

"Oh, hullo," I greeted. They whined again, the white one attempting to jump on the back of the black one. "Don't suppose you have my mom's shoe, do you?"

The dogs looked puzzled. They wanted to play with the kerosene tank. I took it inside.

"Two dogs, right?" I asked Mom, wiping off my feet. "One white, one black? Puppies?"

Mom looked at me blankly.

"They're next door," I told her, and went to put away the tank.

When I came back into the kitchen, Mom was just returning from questioning the dogs. She left her shoes outside, sliding the glass door behind her, and planted her fists on her hips to frown.

"Get your shoe back?" I asked.

She shook her head with impatience. "I asked the dogs, but they wouldn't tell me. They're so rude. I think they're being difficult on purpose."

My grandmother, dozing in a chair by the kerosene stove, jerked awake with a blink and smiled benevolently at her descendents. Posted by yhirata at December 30, 2001 11:03 PM