The Steve Deutsch Birthday

So June for me had traditionally had a unique time marker. That would be the Dr Deutsch birthday lunch usually around mid-month. This TO ME was the unofficial ushering in of summer. I had been going to Steve's bday lunch for more than 2 decades now and when Delia Vogel sent out the text invite via Dexter, of course I accepted. Funny looking back at old posts around this time, I randomly flipped to 2010 and found the post about going to Steve's old office where they were doing a potluck for his birthday. Flipped to 2015 and it was a surprise gathering at Il Cielo restaurant on Burton Way. I even remember the last time Lisa went to one of these in 2018 at Gen-wa, after we had had a massive fight the day before on the drive back from Palm Springs. My marriage was slipping away already, a month before I left Maplewood, and STILL I went to Steve's lunch. <Not to worry about negative memories, I quickly turned right around and THANKED Lisa mentally that I am right now exactly where I want to be>.  Anyway I got to the Henry restaurant on Robertson a couple of minutes before noon. Got a sweet parking spot a half a block away with money still in the meter for an hour. Awesome. This restaurant used to be called the Newsroom. And where the old Pacific Theaters used to be that housed the Cedars-Sinai outpost where I started to work as a temp all those years ago in the early 90s. Walking up to the restaurant I had to smile at the swanky Ivy restaurant with all the valets in front of it. Ahhh West Hollywood. Philma and Delia were in the front waiting for me and it was genuinely good to see them again. I told both of them I had spoken to 'Dexter just yesterday and unfortunately he had just tested positive for COVID <Damn!> and so clearly we would not be seeing him today. Shortly after we got seated, Steve walked up from his office, and Tom Gordon joined! It turned out this would be it for today's lunch. Used to be a much larger group but it didn't really matter who was or wasn't here.  I always appreciate connecting with any of my old Cedars-Sinai team because this was my original FAMILY. Steve and Tom were 2 of my original mentors and we all spent a great deal of time catching up of course. Heck even Lisa brought up for a split second yesterday that maybe she and Johnnie could show up. She would have liked the more intimate gathering. And she was here in spirit anyway considering Tom and Steve both brought up their recent dental experiences with her, including the amount of money Tom dropped for his procedures LOL LOL. Anyway of course I had to share recent pics of Johnnie, and I was happy to see everyone's family growing too. Steve now a new grandfather himself and of course Tom's brood of grandkids has grown as well. It was amusing hearing them talk about all the stuff currently going on at Cedars-Sinai and how the current group of doctors seem like they only want to stay 2 years based on a survey. Really not that far removed from our set of docs at QueensCare huh? Tom bugged me about my job of course, not remembering that I have now been with my company going on 9 years in less than a month. Of course we had to talk finances and investments. And of course Steve had to talk about golf that he never gets to play anymore. I felt bad when he said the last time he played golf was the last time we played on a Friday afternoon. Man, that had to have been 6 years ago or so. I promised him I'd schedule a game in the Valley when he got back from vacation in July. All in all it was a nice lunch. I had mahi mahi fish tacos and some corn and today I wasn't going to worry about glycemic indexes and such. I even had some of the bread pudding Tom ordered for the table for dessert. I mean this IS a birthday lunch isn't it? This was probably the most sugar I had consumed in forever. Months. And so I expected a bit of a crash when I got home. As it was I pre-empted said crash by taking a nap. And I knocked off for a good hour and when I woke up it was already past 4 PM. The first thing I thought of was that I barely had 2400 steps at this point. Funny how ingrained the habit of 11,000 has been. Not lost on me was that I heard Steve and Tom walked every Saturday morning at 8:30 AM now. And so you can say I focused the rest of Friday on getting to my 11,000 <see pic> walking around my neighborhood, nice early summer day as it had turned out to be.  Normally of course Lisa would be working and I would have picked up Johnnie from school. New routines for the summer and especially tonight since they are supposed to be hanging out with Joy and Kalani and fam once and for all. I silently and mentally sent them thoughts of love and laughter and smiled at the thought of Johnnie having such fun with Kavena and Makahinu.  As for me, it turned out to be summer Netflix night and for some reason I ended up binging on another YOUNG LOVE series called First Kill. A vampire and vampire hunter falling in love. Gee where had we seen that before. Oh yeah... werewolf and werewolf hunter in Teen Wolf. Still, I watched all 8 episodes and I am embarrassed to admit that would be the reason I stayed up until almost 2 AM! W-h-a-t? Oh well. I'm glad tomorrow is Saturday and I can sleep in as late as possible...