Oyster Roasts And Tradition

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Last night I went to the annual Rotary oyster roast here in this small town. Oyster roasts are fairly common around this area because we live so near to the Atlantic Ocean and it's shallow sounds off the coastal areas of North Carolina. Not last night though, they bought the oysters from the Gulf of Mexico.

The price for these turnouts has gotten very expensive. It doesn't seem all that long ago they were 5-10 dollars a person, now it's $45 for the same event. Granted, most of the money does end up in the Rotary Club general fund that benefits others. I got to go this year because my sister-in-law opted out at the last moment, and she gave me her ticket. 

One of my brother's three best friends in high school came to visit him during this oyster roast. I was cautioned that he would be there to prepare me. He is a Leo, and we don't always get along. It took me a while to figure out why. But, as it turns out, he is a very conservative businessman who finds my liberal leaning ways truly dispicable.

Back in high school I had a crush on his older sister briefly. Lust might be a more descriptive term. She was blond and beautifully nubile with a great smile, but in the end game I just wasn't her type, and it was very humiliating for me to suffer rejection. Now in her early sixties, sadly, she has Alzheimer's disease, and has apparently had it a while. 

I found an empty space at one of the tables where they dump the buckets full of steamed oysters in a haphazard rotation. The tables have holes cut in them for dumping the empty oyster shells, and everybody is expected to shuck their own. My place at the shucking table was next to a guy I grew up with. We didn't talk much. We were too busy eating nearly raw oysters.

My youngest brother's old friend came strolling up. I greeted him by name. He lives out of town in his retirement, so my brother had sent him to look for me to have someone he knew to be with. He said the same thing to me that he has said to me for the last three times we met each other, "Do you know me?" 

I reacted differently this time to his question after hearing about his sister having Alzheimer's, and refused to feel shamed by what I considered an insulting attitude. I realized he wasn't questioning my ability to remember him, but his own ability to remember me. Instead, I inquired about his sister's condition. He said she was entering the last phases of the disease.

The original guy I joined at the oyster-shucking table (he kayaks regularly with our other brother, the River Master) got his fill of eating steamed oysters eventually, and so did I, but my youngest brother's friend had just gotten started. I made the excuse of needing to look for a restroom to disengage.

As I wandered through the room full of oyster-stuffed people, as if I had a meaningful purpose, I met my youngest brother and told him I was leaving. Because he is the Rotary president this year, he had been outside with the high school kids that had volunteered to do the oyster steaming and heavy lifting. Soon, I went out into the cold night, located my car in the parking area outside, and left the party. 

My home is only a few miles from where this event took place, and it wasn't long before I got home. I kept thinking about this man and his sister and how they both got Alzheimer's fairly early in life. His condition doesn't appear to be dementia or senility, at least I don't think it is, but a genetically imbued dis-ease that is aggressive rather than incrementally discombobulating.

It's scary to encounter somebody that much younger than me having these kind of difficulties. I don't really wanna know if I am right or wrong about the cause being genetic. If their problems are the result of genetics instead of the aging process in general, I might have a little longer before it gets me too. Both my parents were in their mid-eighties before they no longer remembered who I am is.

Admittedly, there are already signs that I'm not as organized in my thoughts that can be seen in my writing, but that's fairly common for writers of any age. That's why there will always be a need for editors. I get so familiar with what I'm writing about I can't "see" it any more.

My brother suggested an approach he uses sometime that seems to help him. He told me that if I use the Speech program to read what I write back to me, that I might be able to pick out typos and mistakes more readily. I tried it and it does appear to bring my focus into an objective mode.


What? You didn't think I'd noticed. '-)

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