Mabenka Restaurant, 7844 S. Cicero Avenue, Burbank, Illinois 60459, 708.423.7679, serves Lithuanian and Polish cuisine. The owners named the restaurant using the letters of their children’s names. I’ve been eating there occasionally since it opened. I love their delicious food and the low prices. And the waitresses are always friendly. The only negative thing I can say about Mabenka is that it’s not in Chicago where it really belongs. It’s across the street from Chicago, so that’s close enough in my books to count as a Chicago restaurant.

 I ate supper there tonight because I couldn’t think of a topic for my blog. As I was sitting at my computer, I thought to myself, how can I write when I feel so hungry? So, I went to Mabenka’s for the first time in about a year.

I went by myself, and I must admit that I really enjoyed the company. I ordered the liver and onions with dumplings, sauer kraut, and mushroom soup. I’m not sure why, but I love liver and onions! I think that’s why I’m still single. I haven’t met a girl who loves liver and onions as much as me. I have only known one other person who loved liver and onions as much as me. And that was my mother.

When I was little, she made liver and onions quite frequently. My brothers ate it without complaints until they got older. Then my mother got creative. She made the liver without the onions and told my brothers that we were eating tiburón (shark). So everytime we ate liver sans onions, my mother said we were eating tigre, león, cocodrilo, among other exotic meats.

One day, we were all eating our liver and my brothers were about halfway finished eating it. Then, I accidentally said, “Mom, this is really good liver!” They all said, “I hate liver!” and stopped eating immediately. My mother was really mad at me for that.

So, I ate my liver and onions remembering all those times that I ate it with my mother and brothers. But I couldn’t finish it all tonight because they served me two large pieces. So, I took the leftovers to go. I’ll eat them in a few days and relive all my liver and onions flashbacks all over again while I eat the re-heated leftovers. As I drove home, I wondered what I would write for my blog entry.

Arturo was another one of my Mexican classmates at Holy Cross School. He looked like your typical Mexican. He was short and stocky with black hair and brown eyes. And he spoke English with a Mexican accent.

There was no mistaking him for Lithuanian. He was very charismatic, so he always had many friends and even more girlfriends. More girlfriends by his calculations. Any girl who talked to him was his girlfriend. But a lot of girls did talk to him because they liked the way he talked.

In class, he usually knew the answer, but sometimes he mispronounced words like shoes. He would always “choes.”  He couldn’t make the “sh” sound to pronounce shoes correctly. He would make the “ch” sound instead.

So, words like “church” and “choose” should have been easy for him, but they caused him just as much trouble. I explained to him that all he had to do was reverse the sounds of ch and sh. I helped him practice, but he never got the hang of it. On Sunday, Arturo went to “shursh” because he would “shoose” to go.

I once went with him to buy some shoes and he narrowed his selection to two pairs of shoes. For some strange reason, he thought I had excellent taste in choes, I mean shoes, so he asked me to help him buy some choes.

Anyway, he holds out the two pairs of shoes for me to inspect and says, “Whish choes chould I shoose?” I said, “Choose? Which shoes?” He said, “Yeah, whish choes?” I was getting frustrated by our interchange because I usually had this kind of conversation with my father. Not about choosing shoes, but about how to pronounce words in English. My father had trouble pronouncing the word “world.” To this day, he can’t pronounce “world.”

There were too many sounds in one word for my father. Arturo’s only problem was differentiating between two sounds: sh and ch. Now that I think of it, he couldn’t say chanclas, either. That typical Mexican word for flip-flops became shanclas.

My mother had super powers, but no one ever believed me. They weren’t super powers like comic book heroes have. Rather, they were more practical super powers that made my childhood extremely unbearable. For example, just by looking at a new friend that I brought home after school, my mother could tell if he would be a bad influence on me or not.

She could even predict if he would wind up in jail and in how many years. I never believed her analyses and I was sure she was completely wrong, but I couldn’t defend my new friends either. It was just easier not to bring them home anymore.

Somehow, she knew everything that I did. When I got tired of my paper route, I quit without telling anyone. I rode my bike home about two blocks away in about two minutes. As soon as I went into the house, my mother was standing by the door waiting for me with her arms crossed and she was glaring at me as I stood there silently. Then she asked, “Why did you quit your job?”

I never did find out how she knew I had quit, but somehow she knew! She could sense my every move no matter where I was. When I was little, I was only allowed to ride my bike around the block. By the time I was twelve, I was allowed to ride for about a two-block radius.

One day, as I was about to cross my mother’s imaginary line that I was forbidden to cross, I heard her yelling at me. How could she know where I was? Anyway, she yelled, “¡David! ¿A dónde vas?” I looked behind me so sure that I would see her there, but she wasn’t there! But I had heard her voice loud and clear.

She also had x-ray vision. Whenever someone sent me a card in the mail for my birthday or some other special occasion, not only did she know if there was money in the card, but she also knew exactly how much money was in the card. But the one thing we both knew for sure was that she would talk me out of my money. She would play on my sense of gratitude for her being my mother. She would remind me how she had raised me, provided me with a good education, and had also provided me with loving relatives who cared enough about me to send me money. She knew exactly what to say. I never kept any of my gift money.

My mother also knew that my first girlfriend would make a fine wife. She could tell just by looking at her. I pointed out to her that she was wrong when I got divorced. Of course, she didn’t believe it. Somehow, I was entirely responsible for the divorce and proving my mother wrong.

Whenever I think of all the excuses that students have given me, I always think of Renee first. She was in my Spanish III class with five other students. This college didn’t have a foreign language requirement, so all the students were in the class because they genuinely wanted to learn Spanish. I remember when I gave them the midterm exam, the department head asked me how the students did. I said that everyone got an A, but that I wasn’t surprised because they all studied extremely hard. Well, the department head didn’t like my answer. She said that she found it hard to believe that the entire class got an A. She said that department expected the grades to form a bell curve. I said that if a student earned an A, I would feel obligated to only give an A to that student and nothing else. At the end of the semester, I assigned every student a hard-earned A. That was my last semester there.

But back to Renee. She was very pretty in a plain sort of way, but not extremely beautiful. She had light brown hair and hazel eyes. She was thin and of average height. Whenever we had to act out a dialogue from the textbook, she really poured her heart out into it. Oh, yes, she was a theater major. We also had a student named Joe who was studying to be a broadcaster, so he would always read the directions for the grammar exercises in his deep, well-modulated voice. Sometimes he would act as the narrator for our dialogues. He would announce such things as, “El día siguiente,” or whatever else needed clarifying. In one dialogue, Renee played a tourist at a restaurant in Spain. She asks the waiter what different meals on the menu are. Apparently, she can’t find anything that she would like to eat. She’s getting flustered by all this. Finally, the waiter says that they do have something that they serve to most Americans who eat there: Hamburgers! Well, for a simple dialogue that most Spanish students wouldn’t take all that seriously, Renee memorized the lines in about a minute and then demonstrated a wide range of emotions that added tremendously to the performance. We all had fun with this simple little dialogue. I really enjoyed this class.

I gave a lot of homework, but since there were only six students, I painstakingly corrected everything they did. The students complained, but since I actually read and corrected everything, no one complained. Then, Renee missed a whole week of class, and she didn’t notify me in any way. When she showed up to class the next week, she said she was sick. She would explain everything to me during my office hours. Well, she said she missed class because she was extremely sick and had to go to her doctor in Champaign, who used to be her mother’s doctor. She didn’t tell me her illness and I didn’t press her to tell me what it was.

She started missing class more frequently. She finally came to my office to explain her situation. She closed the door behind her and told me to sit down. She sat down, but then said nothing. I asked her what she wanted to tell me. Finally, she said, “I have cervical cancer.” She explained how her mother had died of cervical cancer, so she went to her mother’s doctor who regularly tested Renee for cervical cancer. “I’m only twenty-two!” she said. “I don’t want to die!” She hugged me and I hugged her back as she sobbed uncontrollably. I told her that she should worry about getting healthy more than anything else.

She was graduating that semester, and she was suddenly struggling with all her classes. She came back to my office a couple weeks later explaining how her doctor was going to give her a hysterectomy in order to save her life. She cried because now she would never have children. I comforted her the best I could. The surgery was scheduled for a couple of weeks later, after the semester ended. Well, she made up all the work and got an A on the final exam and an A for the final grade. I told her to call me if she ever needed to talk. I never knew how her surgery turned out. And I never heard from her again, either.