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| Photograph - Andrew Taylor, Esquire |
Forty seven years ago Rosemary Healey married Jorge
Alejandro Waterhouse-Hayward in a civil ceremony in Coyoacán, Mexico. We had
attempted to marry at least six times but the judges told us they had no
permission to marry two foreigners. Finally I got the message and contacted the
judge in Coyoacán and presented him with a bottle of expensive cognac.
We could, we did and we regretted it - certainly not our
decision to marry 47 years ago. We regretted today my suggestion that we should
belay our daily morning ritual (now in effect for about 15 years) of breakfast
in bed with our NY Times and the Vancouver Sun. I told Rosemary that we might
celebrate by going to the buffet breakfast at the River Rock Casino in
Richmond.
We drove to Oakridge and parked. We walked to the Skytrain
and got off at Brighouse Station. We faced a long lineup. We finally made it.
We were taken to a table with a view of Fraser River, a cement factory and ugly
barges. This view in spite of it all must be one of the ugliest in town.
Somehow the cement towers hide the mountains. Over the din of the talking we
could hear some heavy drumming (not Japanese drumming but close) – no soothing
music.
Until we
left we watched many a person of extreme girth pass us by with a smile on
his/her face with a plate piled with psychedelic red lobster. A couple of extremely
large Lebanese Christian men had multiple trips to the lobster counter.
The man
who makes omelets told me that on good days (I have no idea what he meant by good) he made over 500 of them between
6am and 2pm plus he used up 25 liters of waffle mix. The omelet was good.
Nothing else was. The bacon was limp the sausages were tasteless and the
desserts were mostly the ones you might find at an oriental bakery. The roast
beef was par-boiled.
There
are no waiters. Those who work there are bussers who must remove from each
table countless plates half-filled with food. We wondered in what level Dante
might have put the kitchen which I would imagine would be hell on earth.
It would
seem to me that Las Vegas could teach the River Rock a few lessons on how to
properly serve a buffet.
Watching
all those people gobbling up their food I began to almost understand the fact
that my Rosemary has hidden her eating disorder for so many years. Before we
came to Vancouver I was ignorant to my dyslexia and in the family we all said
Rosemary ate like a little bird. It has been the reality of living in Vancouver
that has clued us in to all sorts of syndromes we had no idea existed.
Tomorrow
morning we will resume our breakfast-in-bed routine. After so many years I
still recognize how romantic and comforting it is and that the word routine, in
this case is not the appropriate one.