The Menu

I went to have lunch at Atria today.  My mother was better than she was the last time I saw her ... kind of "medium good," the kind of day where she had to check the name on the door of each apartment because she didn't remember where she lived, but she wasn't agonizing over what she was supposed to be doing.  

We have decided to give up on trying to get her help with bathing, but hoping to solve the Depends-resistance problem, I replaced all of her current lacy underwear in her drawers with Depends.  We'll see how that goes.

We went to the dining room for lunch and the menu actually looked pretty good.

 

So.  We had clam chowder to start and ordered the entrée.  The soup came fairly quickly, for Atria (which is understaffed and over worked) but it was more than 15 minutes before the entrée arrived.  I had to ask the waitress twice if we were ever going to get our meals, as people around us were being served.

It arrived without any tartar sauce or cocktail sauce to dip the seafood in.  Also, there was no butter and no honey for the cornbread and no apple slaw.

The servers are really good about avoiding eye contact, but I did eventually ask the server if we could get sauce and they was also slaw in arriving, but by the time they arrived, the shrimp was cold.  The clams -- I should have taken a photo -- were the size of hamster turds, flavorless, and hard as a rock.  AND, I noted, my mother had no shrimp at all.

I would have made an issue of that but from the size of the plate and the food on it, I decided she hadn't noticed and it probably would have been too much for her anyway.  But.  Sheesh.  This was ridiculous.  It is getting more and more that this is the kind of thing that happens.  But I keep telling myself that I don't live there and my mother doesn't notice any difference, so I don't want to make a fuss, but....it was not like this when she moved in nearly 4 years ago.  I remember meals that were actually good, but I don't remember having one in a very long time.

We sat at a table with Margaret, with whom we eat frequently, and with Bea, who is always very quiet.  My mother always makes a fuss over the flowers that adorn every table.

 

She always notices how beautiful they are and always feels the petals of the flowers to see if they are real or artificial, though they are never artificial.

It's funny, but visits with her must wear me out emotionally because whenever I get home from Atria, I don't come in to my office but immediately fall asleep in my recliner.  Today it was for about an hour and a half.