The day after Christmas a little over a month ago, I posted this message here…
Note to self: If you go out for dinner on any future Christmas Day in the future, don't go late. Amber and I journeyed to one of our favorite restaurants last night for an 8:45 reservation. The gentleman who led us to our table informed us that service was running slow because "One of our chefs walked out on us" — he did not explain why — and whatever entree we ordered might take as long as an hour to get to us.
I felt sorry for our server who then had to apologize over and over for things that were not his fault…mostly the fact that they were out of so many items including bread. I have never before been in a restaurant that ran out of bread. I was on my cell phone at one point when he came by our table and I told him, "I'm having a pizza delivered." He said, "Good idea. Could you save me a slice?"
I feel sorry for our server again. I just received an e-mail that the restaurant has closed permanently. It was the McCormick & Schmick's in El Segundo and it was always good until that one evening…and even then, it wasn't that bad and the problems seemed to me forgivable. It's also a place I'll miss for a personal reason. The last few Christmases that my mother was able to go out for dinner, that's where Carolyn and I took her.
We started one year when my gift to her was the snazziest wheelchair you ever saw.
No, I take that back. It wasn't a wheelchair. What my mother needed and what I got her was what's called a companion chair. The difference is that a wheelchair has the big wheels so the person in it can roll themselves around. A companion chair only moves if someone pushes it and the one I got her was a metallic cobalt blue and it glistened and made her feel very special. She called it her "Nascar Wheelchair."
Around the time she hit the age of eighty, walking more than about twenty steps at a time became impossible for her. She could get around the house but not out of it and when I told her, "I'm getting you a wheelchair," she agreed it was necessary but she was worried that, confined to the chair, there would be so many places she just couldn't go.
I assured her that the world had become very much wheelchair-friendly and to prove the point, on Christmas afternoon that year, I gave her the chair and then we took her down to that McCormick & Schmick's. I picked it partly because she loved the food there but also because I recalled the place had a very nice, functional wheelchair lift. You can see it in the above photo. It looks like a copper-colored box and it aids those who cannot climb those stairs to the right of it.
I pulled my car up front into the valet area, which is what you're seeing in this photo. Then I got her chair from my trunk and got her into it. As I did, the parking attendant said I had a choice. I could take her in via the wheelchair lift or I could roll her around to the other side of the restaurant where there was a ramp that would get her inside. I said, "We're using the lift" and then I wheeled her into it, got into it with her and we rode it up.
And then we rode it down.
And then we rode it up again. And down.
I did this over and over — up and down, up and down — three or four times to show her how simple it was, and I showed her how she could work the controls herself. A couple came by as we were doing this and they looked puzzled as to why this this weird guy was taking the lady in the wheelchair up, then taking her down, then taking her up again. I told them, "She wanted to go to Disneyland today but I'm not spending that kind of money" and then I began singing, "It's a world of laughter, a world of tears! It's a world of hopes and a world of fears…"
My mother laughed, asked me when we could go on the Matterhorn and then she said, "Okay, you've made your point. It's easier than I thought." We went in, had a lovely dinner and then I took her out via the ramp on the other side of the building, just to show her how, even when there wasn't a wheelchair lift, there was almost always a way to get her in and out of wherever she wanted to go. That made her very happy.
My mother died in 2012 but I left her companion chair in my trunk for years after and it sometimes came in very handy. I now take it along when I go someplace where it might. In the years since, I used it to transport June Foray, Stan Freberg, Jack Riley, Marvin Kaplan, David L. Lander, Rose Marie, my dear friend Carolyn and several others, and I loaned it out to friends who needed one for a short time. One day right after my knee replacement, Sergio Aragonés pushed me in it to a doctor appointment and one time in a mall, I got it to help out a couple of strangers. A woman had fallen and hurt herself and her husband needed to get her to a hospital. My mother would be happy to see her Nascar Wheelchair used to help others.
What she wouldn't be happy about was to hear that that McCormick & Schmick's had closed. The entire chain of steak and seafood eateries was founded by Bill McCormick and Douglas Schmick in Portland, Oregon in 1974 and eventually expanded to almost 100 locations. The company was acquired by the Landry's Restaurant corporation in 2011 and I don't know how they're doing elsewhere but since then, they've closed the fancy one in Beverly Hills, the huge one in downtown Los Angeles, the ones in Burbank and Pasadena and now the one in El Segundo. I wish I'd known a month ago it was the last time I'd ever eat there. I would have taken the wheelchair lift for one last ride — up and down, up and down, up and down…