My dad turned 60 on March 12th! Ben and I made the trek back to Michigan to celebrate with him on Friday and to help my mom get everything together for his surprise party on Saturday (unknown to him of course!).
Friday night my mom, dad, Ben and I went to Greektown for dinner to celebrate. We've been going to Pegasus in Greektown for as long as I can remember and I can't recall an occasion when my dad didn't run into someone he knew from the Greek community. So as soon as we walked in for his birthday dinner I started laying odds with Ben on how long it would take before he was absorbed in conversation with some guys he's known for a million years. I didn't have to wait long. Before we were even seated my father runs into some guy he used to go to Red Wings games with when he was 19.
We get seated at a booth on the far side of the restaurant and commence with deciding on which of the many mezedes we want to order for the table. Settling on kefalotiri, octopodaki (baby octopus), saganaki, a mixed olive plate, and tiropita we then decide on whether or not we should even both ordering meals or if we should just gorge ourselves on the appetizer selections. In the end we each decide on something small, soup or salad, as our mains since the first course is so large. And here's the funny part. The food arrives. It's a solid "B". Yet I can't stop smiling. And then I figure it out. It's not the tasty treats I'm smiling over. It's the fact that I've been coming to this place with my dad for almost thirty years, sometimes with the whole family, sometimes just the two of us. This place is so tightly wrapped into my childhood conscious that even now, when I can objectively say the food is only pretty good, not great, I want to keep coming back.
The irony is that I tease my dad brutally about his recollections of Red Wings games past, yet here I am taking my very own trip down memory lane. And it gets worse. We leave the restaurant to head over to the MGM casino and I start having more flashbacks. Not the horrible, acid-induced kind. But the kind where you see, hear or smell something and you're right back in the moment you first encountered it. We're walking down the street from the restaurant to the car, noticing how much the area has grown up since I was young and something triggers the memory. I'm 6 or 7 and we're on the way from the restaurant to our car in the same place we've been parking for years and I'm clinging onto my dad's hand for dear life. Nothing scary has happened, yet I've grown up listening to my parents talk about Detroit and I'm scared and holding onto my dad like he's bullet proof, because as long as he's with me I'm safe. In the here and now I can't believe how afraid I was of Greektown with its well lit streets and secure parking structures, but then again, it was a rougher neighborhood when I was a kid. Now I also have the benefit of an adult's understanding of cities, crime, poverty, all the factors that fed into the fear I didn't understand at 6 or 7. Yet there's still something to be said for the childish innocence that allowed me to really believe that as long as I held my father's hand, everything would be okay.
Back in the present we motor over to the MGM and park. Once we're in the casino we split up, my parents looking for a roulette table and Ben and I heading to the craps pit. Fast forward and hour and half, Ben and I have lost all we're willing to lose and can't decide who at the table we'd rather have "on our team" (for those of you familiar with the game, "That's on Your Team"), the guy at the end of the table with more gold teeth than chips or the guy to our right with a handle-bar mustache and an NRA jacket. We quickly decide that while the MGM-Detroit may be themed after a Vegas casino, it lacks the fun you find there because the smell of desperation is too thick to even smell the smoke through. While this isn't a surprise considering the current economic climate, it's still sad. My parents, who both like to gamble from time to time as well, have come to the same conclusion and we book to the parking lot without a second thought.
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