Sunday, May 06, 2018
Sunday Reflection: Perspective
When I was a kid, there was a restaurant near our house called "Lum's." I think it was a chain, but not a very large or successful one. It was part of a group of similar places in the Midwest that served food that was reliable in a fundamentally unspectacular way, including Bill Knapp's, Isaly's, and the rare survivor, Big Boy. They had booths where a family could pile in, and menus on laminated sheets that were impermeable to anything we might dump on them. None of that is particularly distinctive.
Yet, to me, Lum's was the ultimate treat. I have no recollection of why. I just know that for fast food I wanted to go to the Red Barn in St. Clair Shores (where the chicken came in a cardboard barn), and for a sit-down place I loved to go to Lum's.
It makes me sad that it is gone. So is the Red Barn, and the Roma, and Cardinelli's and Sparky Herbert's, and nearly every other place that I really loved as a kid and a young adult. Detroit does that, it seems, as do a lot of other towns that change for the better or worse, or both in time.
But, of course, it wasn't those places at all that I loved, really. It was the fact that I got to go there with my mom and dad and my brother and sister, and something funny would happen and then we would crack each other up and my mom would be the last one laughing. I'm lucky; we can and do still do that sometimes. My mom is still the last one laughing, her voice trailing off as we all catch our breath.
That's one reason I go to church. It reminds me of the right things, and one of those is to be grateful for today, for what was and is and will be.
