Remember last week, when I said I was too full of food from ABC Country Kitchen to write etc etc?

Well get ready for the sequel, cause the week has changed but the song remains the same. I am beginning to question my relationship with ABC Country Kitchen. I love their food, yet every time I leave there, I am in pain from having eaten too much. That’s not the healthy kind of love. I need to learn to stop eating the fabulous food without it hurting me.

Tonight, I had a bowl of chicken with rice soup, a chicken pot pie, and mashed potatoes with turkey gravy. So this was basically a meal with the theme “bring me various combinations of the flesh of birds and carbs, please.” It was way too much, but I ate it all, because it was so good.

And all for $10.99 too, and our waitress was awesome. Sweet, friendly, handled all our special requests and such without even slowing down, and was quick with the refills. I am getting to like this place more and more.

I still miss the restaurant it replaced as our Sunday dinner eatery, a place called Kelsey’s. It was one of a chain. Fairly typical pub-restaurant type place, with the bar in the middle, the big screen TVs for sports, and tables in a U around the bar, more or less. But the food was good and we liked the staff. They seemed to hire an above-average number of cute twinky gay guys. Always a plus.

But about a month or so ago, we went there like usual, and it was all boarded up and dark and there was a poster on the door saying they had gone out of business. So we had to think of someplace else we like, and ABC Country Kitchen was the choice.

I find it very depressing when businesses go under, especially, of course, if I patronized them and thus felt a personal connection to them. A business is such a dynamic and lively organism, providing employment for a few and services for many, becoming a part of people’s daily life, and in general being one of the organs of the community body, and so to see something like that go down, and we are just left there looking at the darkened remains of a once thriving entity…. it just saddens me greatly.

The worst time I experience this, and the time that probably made me so sensitive to this sort of thing forever, was when I first looked at what used to be the family business where I used to work weekends, C. J. Gaudet’s TV and Stereo Sales and Service, and there was a Maytag outlet there instead.

That was a blow to the heartbone and a punch in the breadbasket at the same time. As a business entity (under various names), that business had been there since my grandfather, my Pepe, founded it back in the era of crystal radio sets. Well before I was born, obviously, and so to me, it had always been there. When my grandfather retired, my uncle Sonny took it over, and I guess it never occurred to me that once he got old enough to retire, there would be nobody there to take it over from him. None of his kids (my cousins) were the business type, and looking back, I wish I had seen it coming, got my degree in business, and come back to town to take over from him. I would be quite happy to be a small business owner. I was quite happy working there, and I know I have the right sorts of instincts for business. I probably would have ended up expanding the place, turning it into a chain, who knows. But I wish I had been there to keep the place going intead of it closing down and Maytag taking over.

I still have residual and entirely irrational hate for Maytag over that. I am sure they are a fine company and make good products, but they took over that space when my uncle Sonny retired, and so I cannot even see the name Maytag without a powerful surge of anger flooding my brain.

Screw you and your lonely job, Gordon Jump!

The dog’s cute, though.

So it’s sad when a business dies. And it happens all the time. half of all small businesses go out of business within the first two years. Sad, isn’t it?

But life goes on.