7 August 2025
This Wednesday's lunch at home was quite a bit different for Joyce. The menu, for one thing, was quite a bit more interesting than the usual yogurt, soup and Boost I usually serve her.
And that was because we had guests.
Tom and June Cunningham came down from Sebastopol to join us. Friends for 50 years. More or less.
So we had to expand the menu.
But, I thought, this should make a good test. A table of old friends to engage with and a full meal that we'd all be eating. I was interested to see how she'd do.
The last time we had lunch with friends, she was rather silent and confused. But that was at a noisy restaurant months ago when she was still at home, undiagnosed and untreated.
I was in the kitchen cooking for an hour, so I couldn't tell how responsive she was, but it sounded like she was enjoying the conversation. "June's funny," she told me later. So I think it went well.
By the time I joined them, June was wondering if the grandfather clock chiming every quarter hour next to her plugged into the wall or ran on batteries. Tom explained it to her. But she was quite impressed it only has to be wound once a week. Everything should work like that. Dishes, laundry, weeding, you know, everything.
Oh, the menu. I tried to keep it simple so it wouldn't turn into dinner.
A baguette with olive oil and balsamic vinegar. A (fake) Caesar salad with black olives. Mineral water and wine.
Then a main course of chicken saltimbocca (pounded chicken breast tenders seasoned and floured the sautéed in oil and butter before being covered with prosciutto and havarti and warmed in the oven until the cheese melts graciously over the meat) with pestú (June is Genovese).
I neglected to get a dessert, but we did have coffee. Espresso with a twist of lemon.
And Joyce ate everything. Salad, bread, spaghetti, saltimbocca. Clean plates.
The coffee perhaps made Joyce anxious, even though we hadn't quite heard the end of the second CD of Mauricio Pollini playing Schubert. So we got up from the table and into our cars and drove away.
"They're such nice people," Joyce said as we followed them down O'Shaughnessy.
They are indeed.