11/10, 5:45pm—Austin TX, Burnet Road

It was a whirlwind of a week—I frontloaded most of my work for Texas Monthly at the start of it, then the election happened, then I went to Los Angeles for a brief 48-hour trip to attend the premiere of Kat’s HBO Access pilot, Halfway. We’d planned to go to the Olive Garden in Burbank the day after, because the star of the pilot and her husband are the sort of people who would enjoy going to the Olive Garden with us—but they couldn’t, and then Kat had hours-long production meetings for her NBC/Snapchat series, which was scheduled to begin shooting the next day, and by dinnertime, she was exhausted and I was just trying to make things easy. We ordered Thai food for delivery. I came back on Friday—in the evening, instead of the afternoon, because my heretofore-unbroken streak of getting to the airport two minutes before the plane takes off, rushing across the tarmac toward a flight attendant waiting with a rope ladder, and suffering no consequences for my perennial tardiness came to an end. I rented a car through one of the discount LAX rental places, the shuttle took 30 minutes to arrive, and sprinting across the airport got me there just in time to see the plane begin taking off.

I learned a few things in my time at the terminal, which was not as long as it might have been (my 12:45 flight got rescheduled to 4pm). There is a group that brings emotional support dogs to LAX terminals for just this sort of situation, and I befriended Bailey, the Rottweiler pictured below, as the clock started on my time there. I learned that waiting in an airport terminal for your flight is not actually a torturous way to spend your time, and I hope that I’m able to internalize that and make arriving a few minutes earlier a part of my regular routine in the future.

And I learned that if you sit near a man in his mid/late-40’s at an airport bar who lives in Williamson County and wears a burnt-orange polo shirt and he finds out that you’re a reporter from Texas, he will corner you to tell you how much he loves Beto O’Rourke. I was hesitant to talk politics with him (when he asked what Kat did, and I told him, he said, "Oh, is she Jewish?”, which is not a great start to a conversation, but I was stuck with him after ordering food), but he mostly wanted to talk about Beto, like everybody else. He was heartbroken that he lost, but encouraged by the results. He wants Beto to run for President, and thinks he’ll win—he saw the “Beto for Senate” signs around Los Angeles just like I did, believes that the country is hungry for the kind of hope and change he offers. It was not what I expected him to say, subtle cracks about the Jews running Hollywood or no, based solely on his demographics. He was a nice enough guy, I guess, even though I’ve had enough experiences where people decide they want me to know that they have observations and opinions about The Jews that they think I— with my semitic features and Old Testament name—should be made aware of that I am always on edge in those situations.

Still, we boarded the flight without incident, and landed similarly. I watched Captain America: The First Avenger on the plane, because watching Nazis get beat up seemed like a good time. The movie is funnier than I remembered, too—did you know that there’s an entire plot point in the film about Steve Rogers thinking “fondue” is some fancy European sex act? And that he gets disabused of this notion by Dominic Cooper’s Howard Stark, who says in the finest line-reading of his career, “Fondue is just cheese and bread, my friend”? If not, re-watch it, and thank me for it later.

All of this is a long way of saying that it’s been a long week, but that I was determined to go to the Olive Garden as soon as I could, which was Saturday. I had made plans to watch a movie with my friend Cindy—Overlord, continuing the Nazis-getting-killed theme of my commute from Hollywood—and she confessed that she’d eaten at Maggiano’s and Johnny Carino’s the two previous days, and was not available to join me.

So I sat alone at the bar with a magazine, which is a good time for me. Delia, who has been my server at least four or five times over the past six weeks, was once again there to take my order. She recognized me, asked if I was doing soup or salad this time, or skipping it again. Because the Pasta Pass is near its end, I was determined to get more out of it, and requested the salad. She asked if I was ready to order, and I asked for rigatoni with meat sauce and meatballs, just because I hadn’t eaten that yet.

The order was filled quickly—I hadn’t even started my salad when it arrived—but that was fine, who cares? She dumped cheese upon it at my request, and I got started. The combination of meat sauce and meatballs, it turns out, is good—it’s just extra meaty, which is fine unless you’re a vegetarian, but if you are, obviously you know what you’re in for and what are you doing ordering that? I was hungry, since I hadn’t bought groceries in anticipation of my trip, and ate the first portion quickly.

While I was eating, in another room, there was a party, and a rush of servers attending to its table. I craned my neck to follow what was happening—it was a birthday! The servers sang “Happy Birthday,” more or less the traditional way, which recovered a memory for me: When I was a kid, maybe 9 or 10 years old, things were tight for my family, and my dad had taken a second job as a bartender at the Olive Garden. We never ate there, and it was a relatively brief gig for him—it couldn’t have been more than a few months, and he decided that he liked bartending enough to attend bartending school, then discovered that he liked bartending school more than he liked bartending, so my parents moved us to Omaha, Nebraska, to open a bartending school of their own. This begins an ill-fated saga that I’ll spare you, but the recovered memory was specific: It was about the birthday song that the Olive Garden’s servers used to sing.

I don’t remember how that song went, but I found this on YouTube, and it’s probably pretty close?

Hospitaliano, etc.

Anyway, my family has a whole thing about birthday songs that I thought, until a few years ago, was an absolutely bizarre family tradition: We sing “Happy Birthday” the usual way that white families sing it, then tag on two additional songs that my parents each learned at camp—a bubbly tune that goes, “Kings and queens and princes too / wish the best of luck to you / so wish-a-day, wash-a-day, whaddaya say, birthday! / happy birthday / to you!” and then a distinctly down-tempo number that goes “there is sorrow in the air / people dying everywhere / but happy birthday / to you.” Every birthday of my life, I’ve had those songs sung to me, even if it’s just a voicemail left by my parents while I’ve been out. (Several years ago, at a party for a friend who participated in a particularly intensive theater grad program, I was floored to hear them sing the entire song the same way that the Solomon Family always had; apparently everything belongs to everyone, all of the time.)

The recovered memory involved one birthday, or maybe a string of birthdays between my brother, my sister, and I, where the traditional Solomon Family Birthday Jam got the Olive Garden song tossed into the mix at the end, which my dad had learned when he worked there. It was fun for us, as kids, because who doesn’t want more birthday singing? But I recalled, eating my rigatoni and meatballs with meat sauce, watching as someone who being embarrassed by their friends, asking for that song one year at my birthday, and being gently but politely refused. Maybe no one remembered the words; maybe no one wanted to revisit that my dad worked at the Olive Garden, which was probably not a great job to have with a family of three at home. Either way, I forgot about it the way that you tend to forget about most inconsequential things that happen when you’re a little kid, until last night.

I might could trace the whole deal with the Olive Garden to the fact that my dad briefly worked at one when I was a kid, but I don’t think it’d be accurate. I never ate there—Olive Garden is not cheap when you have a family of five to feed, and my mom could make spaghetti at home in the crockpot—but I don’t think that it took on outsized proportions in my imagination or anything. It was just a restaurant I didn’t go to, like most other restaurants that weren’t fast food or this one place in Florida that showed Chicago Bears games on Sundays that we went to every week during football season, and which I’ve just now remembered was called Waukegan Pizza Company. (It does not appear to exist anymore, though googling the name turned up the DBA filed with the state in 1997.)

I think that if there’s a childhood connection to my Olive Garden enthusiasm, it’s probably that comforts like that were generally out of reach. The idea that you could just go to a restaurant any time you wanted was not how I lived growing up, and so having access to that—having a card I can flash to a server at any Olive Garden, in Texas or Times Square or Burbank, and order whatever I want, is still novel, even though I’ve been able to afford to eat out for a few years now.

This has been quite the meandering journey, and I haven’t even revealed the second portion I ordered, which was cavatappi with crispy shrimp and four-cheese marinara. I don’t usually order the shrimp—deep-fried shrimp are their own meal, not a pasta topping, to me—but we’re getting to the end of pasta pass season, so why leave anything on the field?

I left Delia three dollars on the table, pulled my hood over my head to face the November chill that arrived while I was in California, and walked back to the car to meet Cindy at the theater. The Nazis lost.