You Can’t Drink All Day if You Don’t Start in the Morning by Celia Rivenbark Read Free Book Online

regulars.
    Not five minutes into the game, I hollered “Bingo!” but one of the ladies at our table leaned over and told me that she was afraid I didn’t have “a good bingo.”
    How could this be? Wasn’t my bingo as good as the next person’s?
    “Not a good bingo,” the caller said matter-of-factly intothe microphone after verifying my humiliatingly premature bingo.
    Très
embarrassing! I slumped in my seat and could read the minds of the other players.
    “Thought she had a good bingo. Can you imagine?!”
    The caller went back to start another game, never failing to pronounce the number twenty-two as “toot toot,” like a train whistle. It was funny the first five or six times.
    “She didn’t have a good bingo,” I heard the woman at the next table say to her friend while nodding in my direction. “Not good at all.” God, wouldja let it go already?
    On the other hand, the relief that play could continue, thanks to my superbad bingo, was almost palpable.
    How was I to know they were playing “the letter
L
” game? Afterward, I was much more careful, finally squealing when I successfully won a flashlight in “the letter
X
” game, my first win ever at bingo.
    Afterward, my mama and I enjoyed a very nice turkey and mashed potato lunch for a buck fifty. It occurred to me as I was describing the lunch to my husband later that hanging around my new peeps had changed my speech a bit.
    Seniors always describe food in such terms as “I had a nice Oreo with some very nice milk today.”
    It’s a little
Cuckoo’s Nest
sounding but harmless enough.
    As my mama and I were leaving, our former seatmate said, “Psssst” and pointed at me. I walked over.
    In a whisper that told me that, for whatever reason, she had warmed to us and wanted to do something nice, she toldme that the Moose Lodge across town had free bingo and chicken salad sandwiches every fourth Thursday if we were interested.
    “It’s a nice chicken salad,” she said. “They don’t use too much mayonnaise.”
    I smiled at her. “From your mouth to God’s ears,” I heard myself say. Whoa. Where did that come from? I was one week of senior bingo from saying that I sure loved “that a-Cissy and a-Bobby” on PBS reruns of
The Lawrence Welk Show.
    On the way out again, I noticed a poster on the wall announcing that Tuesday was corned beef and cabbage day. There was even a festive note at the bottom with a little flowered asterisk that promised “Sadie’s bringing the soda bread!”
    I don’t know who the hell Sadie is but I am all in on corned beef and cabbage day. It is one of my favorites. Although sometimes cabbage does give me gas if it’s not cooked long enough.
    Strangely, my mom wasn’t nearly as sold on all this as I was, and this was a problem since I needed her to be my “old people’s lunch beard,” so to speak.
    Yes, I was only a distressingly few years away from full eligibility to play and dine, but that might as well be a million years when you see the chance of $1.50 quiche and salad (beverage included!) slip between your fat fingers.
    “Can’t we go back today?” I whined one Wednesday. “It’s corn chowder day and Sadie’s making the cornbread.”
    “I dunno,” my mom said. “It’s OK, but I don’t want to miss my stories.”
    “It’s just one story,” I said. “It’s
The Young and the Restless
, and we all know that Victor is going to spend at least the next two months chewing the scenery over his dead trophy wife and cutting himself. So! Who wants chowder?!”
    “No, I’m not in the mood,” she said, settling in for another hour with Victor and company. “You go ahead and tell me all about it.”
    “Ack! With the complaining!” I said, and flicked the air with my hand like I’d seen Sadie do a dozen times by now. You can learn a few things from these transplanted Yankees, for sure.
    “Well then, go to the school. I’m sure Soph would love for you to eat with her class.” She was pushing me