I haven’t posted to the blog in several weeks, but I can’t let April depart without mentioning a few dates important to me and my lovely lady, Adele. First off, a joint occasion that, happily, does not refer to income tax; rather, on the 12th day of this month, Adele and I celebrated our forty-fourth wedding anniversary. It was a simple affair, just she and I along with our friends from next door, Greg and Ramona. We had been itching to try the menu at the Thai restaurant not far from us in Oro Valley, and so we invited our friends to join us. Reviews we had read were mostly full of praise for the service and the food, so we were excited about discovering another good place to dine. What a sad disappointment! We had the worst meal in decades, greasy messes of noodles all glued together with mere tiny fragments of the meat or fish that the dish was supposed to contain. Appalled, we felt terrible for our guests, whose meals were as bad as ours, or worse. And as though things couldn’t get still worse, the inferior red wine they served (the choices offered were meager) was warm! Not room temperature, but warm! As though having sat in the sun for hours. The chilled wine glasses did nothing to improve that warm, bodiless fluid. The evening was nearly a total bust, and we left with profuse apologies to our guests for the terrible dinner, while unhappily I was reminded of T. S. Eliot’s opening to his poem, The Wasteland, “April is the cruelest month….” But Greg came to the rescue, and had us stop in at one of his favorite pubs a few doors down from the Thai restaurant. After a couple of very generous Old-Fashioned cocktails and some nice conversation, my depressed mood dissipated, and we ended the evening on a happier note. All thanks to the intervention of our thoughtful dinner companions.

But there’s more. This past Saturday we celebrated Adele’s 75th birthday. Her birthday is actually tomorrow, April 23, but the weekend was more convenient for our guests attend. Our daughters, Leila and Mona, came down from Chandler, and our old Connecticut friends Miki and Jay who live in Tucson, and their son and daughter-in-law, joined us, as well as several of our friends and neighbors from all around Del Webb. The sangria was flowing (the fruit was as potent as the drink), and the beverages ran the gamut from Rieslings and Cabernets to Stella Artois and Guinness Stout. But the food! Oh what a different dining experience was there this time! We had a feast catered by The Persian Room, delicious and plentiful: savory dips and crudites started us off, followed by beef and chicken kebabs with stewed tomatoes and onions, saffron rice, hummus bi-tahineh, flat bread and mixed salad with feta cheese and olives. We have ordered from The Persian Room before, and dined there several times. They do not disappoint. Dessert was prepared by Adele herself consisting of absolutely scrumptious trays of knafeh with walnuts, a sweet and tasty Middle Eastern delicacy. Although we missed a few friends who were unable to attend, the music, games, camaraderie and conversation, and our daughters pitching in to entertain, serve, and clean up, made the evening a complete delight. It was indeed a very happy birthday for Adele.

That same Saturday, the 20th of April, was important to me for one other reason. It was the anniversary of my mother Mary’s birthday–born April 20, 1921 in Soueidieh, Syria, then still a part of the Ottoman Empire. And I remembered her with a silent prayer. As we say in the Orthodox faith, + Memory Eternal +.

Although having missed posting in February and March, I do pledge to post again in May, at the very least for Memorial Day. So for now I will close, with the thought that maybe T. S. Eliot was wrong, April hasn’t been such a bad month, after all.