Over the weekend, Hil (my GF), her sister Court, her brother-in-law Iggy, and I took Hil and Court's elderly grandmother out to lunch. The grandmother is no longer very mobile, but Iggy is a nurse, so he was more than capable of popping her between wheelchair and car.

We ate at "Suzy Q's", a BBQ joint near the Buffalo waterfront. It was in a not-great part of town, a neighborhood that has suffered greatly from the Robert Moses-style insertion of a limited-access freeway along the waterfront, cutting off the community from the beach. At any rate, the food there was amazing. The proprietor claims to have opened the place only after traveling across the country learning the BBQ traditions of different regions. This gave Iggy and I a wonderful vision of an idealistic cook walking into the distance, with a bindle of chef's tools across his shoulder. Think "Kain" from "Kung Fu."

At any rate, they had pulled pork, smoked polish sausage, ribs, and piles of other meats that I can't recall right now.  There was also some amazing cornbread, smothered in butter and honey, and the best fried corn I've had since I left Georgia.

After we returned the grandmother to her room at an assisted-living community, Iggy and I went off to join some friends for baseball. Iggy did quite well, impressing himself, as it had been 14 years since he last played. His best story was that when he was didn't make his high school baseball team, one of the older players on the team was a kid named Manny Ramirez. And Manny was only the second-best player on that team! Their star also went of to play for the pros, but apparently didn't quite reach Manny's rarefied heights.

I, on the other hand, was a soccer player in my youth. I played softball a dozen times or so in the Corps, but I'm still a terrible hitter. I just can't get the ball past the infield. Luckily, I'm also terrible at throwing and mediocre at catching. I managed to misjudge the hop of a ground ball and it smacked right into my ankle. I laughed it off, since it didn't seem too bad. But that evening, I took off my shoe, and BAM that ankle swelled right up as soon as the shoe's pressure was relieved. A little RICE and I'm good as new, or at least as close to new as someone in his third decade can be. We're going to play again in a week or two. Practice makes perfect! There was some talk of challenging a T-ball team that was practicing at the next field over, but our consensus was that we would have been crushed in a manner most humiliating to a bunch of adults.

Posted by: Boviate at 05:56 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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