The Birthday Boy at 92, with Peking Gourmet Cheesecake, and Chinese waiters singing a chorus of Happy Birthday to You! Photo Socotra.
When I get older losing my hair,
Many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a valentine
Birthday greetings bottle of wine?
If I’d been out till quarter to three
Would you lock the door,
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I’m sixty-four?
– Lennon and McCartney
Who would have thought that we would all be closing in on 64, Paul would be a senior citizen, and John in his grave for decades?
Strange. The skies opened at mid-day, and sheets of rain drenched the Ballston neighborhood around the office and the Willow Restaurant. We were in between earthquakes and hurricanes, and I was wondering if a plague of locusts might arrive before the storm hit us in earnest.
Bread, toilet paper, milk and Tampex were on the emergency preparation list for the emergency stockpile, not that I need anything except the second. Those are the products that fly off the shelf when Bob Ryan the Television Meteorologist gravely says “get ready, Washington!”
I added a full tank of hi-test for the Hubrismobile, some AA batteries, a couple 1.75ML bottles of Popov Quality Discount Vodka, several flasks of Diet Schweppes tonics, lime juice and the cooler to stock up on ice for when the power goes out after the winds drop a tree on the line connecting Big Pink to the grid.
It had been one of those days, and I was starting to lose the bubble on which of the proposals I was working on. There was a virtual Red Team on one thing, and data calls on the big IDIQ effort- you know, “Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity,” which is the government’s way of awarding you precisely nothing in exchange for the right to compete in a more limited version of free-and-open competition for Government work. Then there were two others in various states of recruiting and writing, and they began to blue together.
I wondered how long this was going to go on. The Government can’t get out of its own way without contractors these days, and given the budget, won’t be hiring any more govvies with their pensions and benefits. I think we will be OK, but you never can tell.
A colleague had leaned over to me earlier in the day, and said that the Community leadership had been planning on offering up a package of 8% cuts to the budget, and the White House had shaken its collective head and said: “Why not look at something between 18-24%”
Yike! I have no idea what that is going to mean. Obviously, the budget has zoomed since 9/11, and I am sure there are many areas that can stand some reduction, but the deficit crisis means we are going to try this with forces still in the field confronting the Bad Guys.
We did something similar after DESERT STORM and the fall of the Berlin Wall, which caused some memories to come back. I recalled the start of the Air War over Iraq, with the mass launch of cruise missiles and the impact of precision weapons. Tom was the Director of Naval intelligence, then. My pal Paul was Flag Aide, and he had to call him at the Peking Gourmet Inn the night the missiles flew. He was at dinner with the Chinese Defense Attaches!
That was a coincidence, I thought as I powered down the computer. Mac’s family had honored me with an invitation to his 92nd birthday dinner. He was born on the 25th of August in 1919, the second installment of the plague year of the Spanish Influenza. Almost a full century ago, a time when the acrid smell of gunpowder could still be sniffed in the dank lower reaches of the trenches of the former Western Front.
Mac’s family has a long history with the Peking Gourmet Restaurant. He and he wife Billie would take the kids there for special occasions, when the boys would stick the chopsticks up their noses to look like walruses.
Mac had contacted the manager, Ray Leong, and secured the Bush Room for the occasion. The specialty of the house is the Peking Duck, and theirs is world class.
I had read about the place for years in the Post, since the little strip-mall palace had attracted all the greats and near greats of this hot-house political town, and both Bush elder and junior had a particular fondness for it.
The Peking Gourmet has been operating out of the slightly thread-bare mall along Rt.-7 in Falls Church since 1978. Founder Eddie Tsui wanted to run a restaurant specializing in northern Chinese cuisine, an featuring a flagship item that few could afford back on he Mainland. He decided on Peking Duck as the specialty, and the Peking Gourmet Inn was born.
This was no ordinary ethnic restaurant. Eddie ruled out ordinary store-bought ingredients as inadequate to generate the authentic taste he was seeking, and instead founded a parallel family farm business to grow jumbo spring onions and cucumbers. He formulated his own recipe for hoisin sauce and hand crafted each pancake for the delicate wraps for the thinly sliced duck and golden glazed fat.
I parked the Hubrismobile in front of the Post Office across the alley from the mattress store and the inauspicious entrance to the restaurant sandwiched in between the Hispanic Market. The narrow corridor leads direct to the reception area, which doubles as the take-out window, a complex and tangled space that conceals a vast bright dining area swarming with Chinese waiters and Hispanic waitresses.
I asked for Mac’s party, and was walked back through the main dining room, into another through a large portal, and behind a tall oriental screen to the Bush Room, where the Presidents looked down on a round table for twelve with a gigantic Lazy Susan in the middle.
Only Kathy was there, from the Alzheimer’s Program at Arlington Hospital. Mac had spent his third career there, after the Navy and the CIA, helping other’s cope with the insidious disease as he had endured its effect on his beloved Billie.
“Hi!” I said brightly “Where is everyone?”
“The Jaguar had a flat tire,” she said, looking up from her cell phone. She already had a gin and tonic, and I asked our angular red-coated waiter – Peng, according to the tag- for a glass of white- not at Willow-style happy hours prices, I’m afraid- but crisp and good when it arrived. We chatted about the hospital, and what Mac was still doing in service to the community.
I got a contract modification that I still did not understand on the Blackberry, and sent it off in the ether as Mac appeared, none the worse for wear, with the story of the failed tire and the bandits at the Goodyear Dealer on Glebe Road.
“They had to keep it overnight,” he said. “So we just left the car and came direct.” Peng brought tall glasses of Tsingtao Beer.
Mac started the order a brace of ducks. A single duck can feed a family of four fairly well, but with the gaggle at the table, two was a minimum. Kung-pao chicken, Spicy Shrimp, steamed dumplings, spicy green beans, Scallops, white rice and all the sauces where eventually delivered to the Lazy Susan, though Peng the waiter brought the pancakes first along, with a plates of scallions and cucumbers and bowls of their Hoisin sauce, which is absolutely fantastic.
The ducks arrived whole, and a Hispanic girl sliced them right by the tableside – it was fascinating to watch the process, and the lady was very efficient with her gleaming knife. There was hardly any fat on the neatly aligned pieces as Peng brought them to Mac to assemble what amounted to a Peking Duck taco.
Grand kids at the Peking Gourmet. Photo Socotra.
The service was solicitous as the family dined with gusto, the Lazy Susan bringing the feast around in a truly moveable manner. The talk was of the duty stations where the family grew up, in London and Naples, and Coronado and Honolulu. Along with Mac’s long career in Washington, it was a kaleidoscope of the American Century played out on the background of an old- and new- Chinese landscape.
The feast was consumed almost in its entirety when a hoard of Chinese waiters brought Mac his slice of Cheesecake with a single candle. They like it when people who beat down Imperial Japan dine with them.
He smiled and dug in. “I haven’t eaten this much in years, “ he said with a smile.
All we could do was smile right back. Happy Birthday, Mac. And many more!
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com