The Owl and the Guacamole : Tales of a Dinner Party

MY FRIEND ALAN called and asked if I would go with him to a dinner party. His wife was out of town. “These people are very nice,” he said. “You’ll like them.”

We noticed when we arrived that there were lots of miniatures and pictures of owls. “We used to have an owl,” the hostess said. “People say they can’t be tamed but we did. We found her when she was very young. Her wing was hurt. We took her in. She was like a baby. She lived in the house. She used to sit on my shoulder. See there.” She pointed to a picture on the wall.

“That’s amazing,” I said.

“It was amazing,” she said. “But after a year we had to let her go. Her wingspan got too big. We saw her one time after that. A few months later. She came back with another. I think it was her mate. They sat on the roof just over there.” She pointed out beyond the pool. “I never did figure out whether she was trying to show the other owl us or us him. Whatever. People say they can’t be tamed but we did. Have some guacamole,” she said. “It’s very good.” She went off to greet her other guests.

I sat down on the couch next to a man who had his foot in a cast. “What happened to you?” I asked sympathetically.

“I was attacked by a squirrel,” he said.

“That sounds awful,” I said. “Did you have to have a rabies shot?”

“Oh, no, the squirrel didn’t bite me. I was climbing up a tree. You see, we have these citrus trees, and the squirrels were eating all the fruit, so we set up squirrel traps and caught two, baby squirrels, and I climbed up a big ladder to take the traps down, and the mother squirrel attacked me.”

I couldn’t help it, I was on the squirrel’s side.

“It was sort of like the lady and the tiger,” he explained. “I chose to jump. I broke my foot on the asphalt. It was terrible.”

“Have some guacamole,” he said. “It’s very good.”

We sat down to dinner shortly after that. The man with the broken foot was seated next to me, his wife, directly across. “She’s President Reagan’s pen pal,” he said to me proudly.

“You’re President Reagan’s pen pal?” I asked, unable to let it go.

“Yeah,” she said. “I write to him all the time. And you know what? The other morning he called me up. I was sitting in the kitchen, 11 o’clock, and the phone rang. A voice said, ‘White House operator, the President is calling.’ ”

“Why was he calling you?” I asked.

“You see, every time he gets in trouble, I write him a letter telling him I know he didn’t do anything wrong.”

I laughed. “He probably calls you up because you’re the only one in the country who thinks he didn’t do anything wrong,” I said. I couldn’t help it.

“That’s not true,” she said emphatically. “No one in the country thinks he did anything wrong.” She smiled. “He said he was going to call me up again,” she said.

Her husband said, “He told her to call him Ron.”

“Did you?” asked the host.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I couldn’t call him that.”

I looked over at the host and smiled and suddenly realized that he was the real estate broker who had convinced my parents in 1969 when they were moving to New York not to lease their house--”Real estate prices in Beverly Hills are falling,” he told them, “you better get out quick.” And, sadly, they had taken his advice.

“Didn’t you sell my parents’ house?” I asked him.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I did. That’s right. Did you know it sold again last week?” he asked me. “Wonder what it sold for?”

“I don’t want to think,” I said.

My friend Alan looked a little pale. We got through dinner. The food was good although locked in some ‘60s version of gourmet--Cornish game hens a l’orange stuffed with wild rice, and Chinese pea pods on the side garnished with a little bit of mushrooms, and a kind of floating island for dessert.

Someone asked the man with the broken foot again how it had happened. His wife told the story. I was still on the side of the squirrel. As they were serving coffee, the hostess told an off-color joke, bawdy, about a priest. It was made stranger by the fact that one of the guests was an ex-priest who had been recently defrocked for his advocacy of birth control. They began to go around the table telling dirty jokes. We excused ourselves before they got to us.

The hostess walked out. She saw that I noticed a large ceramic owl on the brick wall that edged the driveway. “We used to have an owl,” she said. “Did I tell you? People say they can’t be tamed but we did.”