Hardly anyone would believe
Author: Bill Roberts
Hardly anyone would believe
that you could have a French meal
for seventy-five cents, dollar-and -a-
quarter tops if you chose lamb ragout.
The seventy-five center was lentils and
spicy sausage, always my favorite at
Chez Odette on Wisconsin Avenue,
a tiny darkened room with seating for
twenty or so diners at five tables and
three booths with lumpy, cracked seats.
I had breakfast there every morning
before my Physical Chem class at A.U.
Always three fried eggs, white toast and
French roast coffee, as much as I wanted.
Also seventy-five cents and who knows
how much cholesterol over a year’s span.
How delicious, how atmospheric, how
unbelievable to think that a buck – I
always left a quarter tip! – could buy
so much savory pleasure and inner peace.
Jack and Jackie Kennedy must have
though so too: we, my bride-to-be and I,
joined them every Wednesday evening
for dinner at Odette’s where Jackie also
preferred the lentil dish, Jack usually
springing for the pricier ragout of lamb.
We didn’t exactly eat with them, just
near enough by to nod when they came in
or left, their schedule a bit more erratic
than ours in those halcyon days of yore.
But who would believe such a tale, that
you could get a French meal for seventy-
five cents? And in such good company!
(Published in a 2006 online issue of Slow Trains Magazine)
Note: Growing up in and hanging around Washington D.C. from the Thirties to the Fifties, I’d see all sorts of people – celebrities, the great, the gross and all the in-betweeners. It was the great part of my education in human nature, to watch people, study them, analyze why they did what they did. Jack and Jackie were obviously very much in love when they sat across from one another in cramped Chez Odette, holding hands across the table, looking deep into one another’s eyes, talking softly. Pretty much like Irene and me, I guess. Wonderful carefree days when we were both getting educated at American University, thinking our world was nearly perfect, nothing to change. Ah, the changes indeed came. After JFK was elected, then assassinated, with assassinations of MLK, RFK and John Lennon to follow, the world changed drastically and forever. No longer were famous people so easy to spot on the street, in a corner of a restaurant. And the world is still changing. Alas, too often not for the better, but that’s the opinion of a nostalgia freak.
