Cheeseburgers & Strawberry Milkshakes

After an excruciatingly long day at my day job, 13 hours by the end of it, I had to grab a quick dinner.  I stopped to get a 6 piece chicken McNugget meal at McDonald's.  It was not Weight Watchers friendly, but it tasted so good.  Though the guy behind the counter gave me a hard time because I asked for the dollar menu size sweet tea instead of the kid's size.  My argument, the drink is a separate ringing item in your system and the kid's drink has the same dollar amount as the Dollar Menu size.  I could be very wrong about this, but at 10:00 at night I was in a very piss-poor mood.

But it did get me thinking about my paternal grandfather.  My grandparents used to have these coffee mugs from McDonald's in their kitchen cabinets.    Once upon a time they were part of a McDonald's promotion where you bought the cup and were able to get free, or discounted, refills of coffee for a specified period of time.  They were a heavy white plastic with a school bus yellow top and the writing, detailing the promotion, had long ago washed off.  My grandfather used them almost everyday for his coffee.  I don't know for sure, but I heard that he used the mugs long after the promotion had ended but the owners of the fast-food restaurant never said anything and continued to honor it.

Almost everyday for lunch he would go down to the local McDonald's and buy a Quarter-pounder with Cheese and a Strawberry Milkshake.  He'd bring it back to the house and eat it in his favorite chair in the living room.  I have a clear memory of his arthritic hands, with gnarled fingers and long fingernails, wrapped around the yellow paper of the sandwich.  His fingernails were always clean and much longer than I've ever been able to keep mine, but not in a feminine way.  The skin on his hands was rough and calloused from years of difficult work out at the military base.  The pinkie finger nail was much longer than the others, almost long enough to scoop up a pea from a dinner plate, and he would tell me that it was his "nose-picker" and laugh.

I don't think I ever saw him wear jeans, though I remember he had a denim jacket.  He wore pants that were probably cotton or polyester with shoes that weren't exactly dress shoes.  He never wore tennis shoes or sneakers that I can remember.  Button-up shirts with an undershirt and some kind of hat, though rarely a baseball cap.  I remember thinking that this was how old men dressed but now, with shows like Mad Men, we are seeing a resurgence of that look.  So it was simply the style of dress that he'd learned as a young man and simply never changed.

I have thought about him a lot recently and I'm not entirely sure why.  I don't know if it's because I see my father getting older and I am making subconscious comparisons, or because I miss those times in my life, or both.