Captain Kim to Sail on Other Adventures
I'll be let out of "Facebook Jail" in about four and a half hours. Until then, I cannot post, share, like or comment on anything. So that means, until then, I cannot say anything on Facebook about what I can now finally share publicly anywhere else: Dad and Sherri have sold the Shipwreck Cafe and are officially retiring.
I've actually known since October 3, because Dad called to let me know via the phone, reasoning that he thought it would be more appropriate for me to find out about it before hearing about it only at Angel's birthday party. Now, I did note that I planned to come early that day -- which I did -- and in that case he still could have told me well in advance of the party being underway, but I still appreciated the gesture. That said, I was still one of the last to know: Angel and Gina knew already; all the grandkids on Sherri's side (that is, all Angel's and Gina's kids) knew too. Dad said he had not yet told Christopher and felt no particular pressure to tell him sooner, since Christopher would have had the least emotional investment in the place of all of us. And to be fair, not a single one of us had any interest in taking it over, hence the sale to people outside the family.
Apparently Gina knew first, well in advance of any other family, but that made sense -- "in case anything happened," as Dad put it. Dad told me during that phone conversation that he actually wasn't as ready for retirement as Sherri was, but Sherri has been ready for some time. He also said he can imagine maybe one day getting a part time job working for someone else, just to give him something to do. In any case, Dad asked me not to share the information publicly until the papers were signed, so that's why I hadn't written about it earlier. It's on Facebook now, so clearly it's public.
And you know what? This did not even fully hit me until just now, as I am writing this: my parents are retiring. More specifically, my parents are retirement age. I keep thinking about when both Grandma McQuilkin and Grandma Rhoda died in 2011, and Sherri said, "We're next in line." That was eight years ago now. I don't expect my own parents to bite it any time soon, mind you; I fully expect them to be around for many years to come. The point, though, is this -- that time still goes by quickly. And if you take a significant step back from the morbidity of death, and merely shift it to retirement? Well, now I'm next in line. Granted, I am not likely to retire for well more than another two decades at minimum -- barring some kind of global catastrophe, and climate change alone does make that more and more likely -- but, still. The same concept applies: the time flies.
I've always had this problem, though. I was marveling at how fast time flies when I was only fourteen years old. I remember Dave, Gina's then-husband, actually calling it out to a friend of his once: "This kid's only fourteen and he's complaining about how time flies!" or something to that effect.
It does make me want to take more vacations. I can't remember where I read it now but I did read something recently about how a key to making time slow down is for your brain to be processing new things. The daily routine, where most things are just the same over and over again -- it all blends together and it whooshes by. When you're in a new city, or even a place you rarely visit, your brain has to slow down and take in all these details it can no longer take for granted. In that sense, I suppose it's a benefit for Dad and Sherri in their new position: they already travel a lot, and they love it, understandably. And if they are frequently going places where they see things they have never seen before, their lives will slow down, and what ultimately are their twilight years will still feel like the period that lasts the longest. Maybe there's something to that, and something to what I can perhaps look forward to myself.
Anyway. Holy shit, I do have a knack for making just about anything about me, don't I? Well, I do have a pretty good defense here: this is my personal blog and by definition that's about me! So there!
I couldn't say this at the time, but the whole reason I wanted to have lunch at the Shipwreck before Angel's birthday party on October 6 was because I knew it would be the last time I had any opportunity to eat there while Dad and Sherri still owned the place. They have run one "Shipwreck Café" or another since 1995—twenty-four years ago—and even ran two of them concurrently for two years between 2009 and 2011. This means they even had the current location for a full ten years -- right down to the month.
I would have just eaten there alone if I'd had to, but Dad happened to be at the restaurant helping out busing tables and so he sat down to eat with me, which was nice. It was even nice, honestly, to get a one-on-one lunch, just Dad and me. I did text Gina and Beth to invite them to join us, but it turned out their day that day was too busy, as they had been visiting David and his girlfriend in Vancouver, WA and would be driving straight to the party from there. Gina did say something, though, that has been repeated and I kind of don't agree with:
The new owner will be leaving the same menu so you should have more opportunities!
The same sentiment was shared in the Shipwreck Café's announcement post on Facebook, presumably written by Sherri:
The name will be the same and so will the recipes. All our excellent staff are sticking around so hopefully you won't notice anything different.
All I can think when I hear that is, ...For now. I mean, of course the new owners will keep things unchanged for a while, so as not to alienate their many regular customers or even longtime staff. But there's no way that will hold for long; everything changes eventually -- even Dad and Sherri changed things over time, and they would continue to if they kept the restaurant longer. So, naturally, will the new owners. But they won't make the same changes Dad and Sherri would. Also: I'm not just some average regular customer. Merely knowing Dad and Sherri no longer own the place completely changes the context. Even with an unchanged menu, it still won't be the same experience eating there. I may yet eat there again -- in fact, it seems relatively likely I will at some point -- but it still won't be the same.
Now don't get me wrong, though -- I do not at all begrudge Dad and Sherri making this decision, and as long as it's a decision that makes them happy and they feel it's right for them, then I am sincerely happy for them. These new chapters are inevitable in everyone's life, which I fully understand, accept, and support. I just disagree with the idea that eating there after they're gone won't be any different. That would be like saying a visit to your childhood home feels the same as when you lived there as a kid. The memories will still be there, of course, but the experience will still change.
So what about last night, then? I considered going to see Gemini Man but changed my mind -- it has barely a better MetaCritic score than Lucy In the Sky did and that movie barely fell short of being a total waste of time. Shobhit had a Braeburn Condos board meeting for a little over an hour, but I just still stayed home all evening.
We had our dinner before Shobhit went to the meeting, and afterward we watched a bit of TV. He's suddenly lost interest in Netflix's The Politician (even though I have not), so, after we watched Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, I went looking for something else streaming we could watch. That was how I discovered the "Apocalypse" season of American Horror Story—the first season I've had any real interest in seeing since its third season, and that one is its eighth, from just last year—is finally available on Netflix. So, we watched the first two episodes of that, which both Shobhit and I found pretty exciting and entertaining.
That was all I was willing to watch before I needed to start getting ready for bed.
Shobhit has a rare full day off today -- and will again the next two Mondays -- which is probably why he was up so late last night. I had a hard time sleeping very well most of the night, which lately is pretty rare; usually I sleep like a log these days. I'm sure that didn't help this stupid cough that won't go away -- I hesitate to call it a "cold" at this point; I am rarely congested and I don't feel sick at all; by and large physiologically I feel totally fine. It's just this fucking cough that won't go away, and seemed to be a little better yesterday but feels slightly worse today. Am I just to be dealing with this shit all month or what? I know I can track it back to Las Vegas, and I flew home from there on October 1. What a pain in the ass.
Anything else I can update you on? I guess I can mention Ivan, who has now been in New Zealand two and a half month and still has not landed a job. He keeps moving from one of the more notable cities or towns to another, and in a country like that he's going to run out of them quickly -- he deemed Auckland to be an overrated city within a couple of weeks of arriving there; he then attempted to settle in Wellington, which he kept positively comparing to Portland, Oregon and suggesting he expected to stay there for some time. I only learned just last night that he has moved again, now to Christchuch on the south island.
Apparently his brother gave him the idea to bartending school, from which he graduated last Thursday. He acted like this was a brilliant idea, but evidently he decided literally within days that there were no such employment prospects in Wellington and skipped off already to Christchurch?
I only mention all this because, when he left for New Zealand at the beginning of August, he told us he expected to return "next year," like maybe he'd be gone for roughly a year, instead of the maximum two years allowed by his work visa procured thanks to his dual citizenship with Canada. I'm beginning to think now that it may be less than that, even, and that, much like his attempt to move to Vancouver, B.C., he'll run out of resources and, convinced there is no work to be found (plenty of which I'm sure there is available, it's just, like a lot of us, it's work he's not willing to do), come back.
And, inevitably, he'll come back to our place. He's already using both our storage unit in the parking garage and the guest room closet as storage space for everything he did not take to New Zealand, and Shobhit also already offered for him to live with us again when he comes back, clearly with the desire for the extra rent income again. Ivan seemed open to it, so at the moment I kind of feel like it's inevitable that, for some period of time at least, Ivan will live with us for a third time. I have mixed feelings about that for a multitude of reasons, but also: whatever. I've known Ivan five years now and it's getting to the point where I can more convincingly be "whatever" about things.
He has been sending me lots of pictures, though, and invariably they are stunning. One of the four he sent me last night was so amazing, of just a small tree atop a flower covered hill but it was jaw droppingly beautiful, I'm actually thinking it might be worth getting framed. So, there's that at least. (I haven't loaded the shots he sent last night to Flickr yet so I can't share that one, but all the shots in today's DLU are also from New Zealand.)
The thing is, Ivan has a habit of using international travel as a means of running from his problems, which inevitably follow him wherever he goes. I'm not sure he'll ever truly learn that lesson. He's passing the age of 35 on his next birthday though, which means he won't ever qualify for a work visa like this again, so in all likelihood he won't have a perceived international "escape" in the same way again. At the moment, I kind of feel like he'll head back to Seattle by the beginning of next year at the latest. Maybe even sooner. Of course, I could be wrong. I've been wrong before.
It would sure be convenient if he got back in time for Shobhit's and my trip to Australia, come to think of it. Alexia, our neighbor down the hall, already said she'd look after the cats while we're gone, but it would obviously be better to have someone who was actually staying in the condo. This is all months down the road, though, so we'll see.
[posted 12:41 pm]