Chapter 20: Thursday Tradition
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Every Thursday, me and the old man post up at Boulevard American Bistro in Covington. It's our thing. Chicken tenders — we call them teeny and tenders. Simple. Nothing fancy about the order itself.
But that's not really the point.
The point is the third drink. Charlie — the bartender — he makes us this mystery cocktail every week. No menu. No description. Just "here, try this." And me and Dad sit there like two idiots trying to guess what's in it. Swirling it around, taking little sips like we're sommeliers at a wine tasting when really we're just two guys who can barely tell the difference between bourbon and brandy half the time.
Then we name it. And the names... the names are where it gets good.
"Lick Her 43." "HR Is On PTO." "The Vanilla Violation." "The 43rd Position." "Floral Foreplay." We sit there cracking ourselves up coming up with the most inappropriate name we can think of. The kind of names that would make a nun clutch her rosary. The kind that guarantee neither of us could repeat them in mixed company.
It's stupid. It's juvenile. It's the best part of my week.
Here's how it started.
There was no plan. No "let's make this a thing." It was just a Thursday — maybe eighteen months after the accident, when I was out of the worst of the rehab gauntlet and back in Louisiana and trying to figure out what my life looked like now. Dad called. Said he was in the area, asked if I wanted to get something to eat.
We ended up at Boulevard because it was accessible. That's the whole reason. The entrance was level. Parking wasn't a nightmare. Tables were the right height. I know that's not romantic, but that's the truth about choosing where to go when you're in a chair — half the decision is just: can I actually get in the door and sit at a table without a production?
Boulevard passed. So we went.
We got tenders — because they were on the menu and they were good and neither of us was trying to be fancy. We talked about whatever. His work, my work, the news, whatever game was on. The usual.
And then Charlie — who'd made some kind of seasonal cocktail that week — slid two glasses across the bar without explanation and said "try it."
Dad picked it up, looked at it, looked at me. "What do you think it is?"
I had no idea. It was orange-ish. Sweet. Something herbal underneath. We debated for five minutes. Named it something I don't even remember now — something dumb, probably not even that inappropriate yet, we hadn't unlocked that level of the game. But we laughed about it. And when we left, we both said something like "same time next week?"
That's how traditions start. Not with ceremony. With "same time next week."
The naming competition has evolved. There are unofficial rules now, though nobody wrote them down.
Rule one: the name has to work as a cocktail name. It can't just be a slur or a random dirty word — it has to actually sound like something you'd see on a menu at a bar that has no shame and no HR department. The craft matters.
Rule two: the judge is Charlie. And Charlie has developed a rubric over time that involves some combination of groan-worthiness, technical creativity, and how hard he laughs when he hears it. He's a fair judge. Tough but fair.
Rule three: whoever names it wins, but winning means exactly nothing and bragging rights are non-transferable and expire in seven days. Next Thursday the slate is clean.
Dad usually wins. I won't admit that more than once, so you caught me on the right chapter. He has a gift for it — something between the military precision of someone who's briefed generals and the wiring of a man who genuinely still finds the word "duty" funny. He can get there faster than I can. He just fires. I tend to deliberate too long, overthink the construction, miss the timing.
One Thursday — maybe two months in — Charlie put something in front of us that was bright purple. Like aggressively purple. Like "someone spilled a Smurf" purple. Dad took a sip, made a face like he'd just been personally insulted, and said, "That tastes like a flower shop had a fight with a liquor store and nobody won." I almost choked on my tender. We named that one "The Domestic Violet-ence." Charlie wrote it on a napkin and pinned it behind the bar. It's still there.
That napkin kills me. It's proof. Proof that something small and dumb and perfect happened on a random Thursday night. Proof that we were here, and we laughed, and nobody needed a reason.
Recent winners include "Lick Her 43" — which came from a Licor 43 situation that I am not going to explain further — and "Floral Foreplay," which Dad named in about four seconds flat after Charlie slid over something with elderflower and lavender, and he said it so quickly and so confidently that Charlie actually had to set down what he was carrying. We all just looked at each other. That was it. Done. No debate. Unanimous.
Here's the thing about rituals you don't plan: they sneak up on you. Nobody sat down and said, "We're doing this every Thursday forever." It just became the thing. One Thursday turned into two, two turned into ten, and somewhere along the way it stopped being a dinner and became a landmark. The week doesn't feel right without it.
Because here's the thing nobody tells you about breaking your neck — it's not just the big stuff that changes. It's the little rituals. The ones you didn't even know mattered until they're gone. Grabbing a beer with your dad used to be something you did without thinking. Now it's something you plan around catheter schedules and wheelchair-accessible parking and whether the table height works and if you can actually hold the glass.
And you do plan it. Every time. Because that's the math now. There's a checklist that lives in the back of your mind, always running: Is the entrance clear? Is there a step? Will there be a high-top table I can't get to? Is the parking lot the kind that hasn't been repaved since 1987 and your wheels catch in every crack?
Boulevard passes all of it. It's been tested and cleared. More importantly — and this is the thing that matters most — they know us there. Charlie knows. The staff knows. Nobody looks at the chair. Nobody does the thing where they talk to Dad like he's my translator. They just bring the tenders and get ready for cocktail theater.
Before the accident, me and the old man would grab food wherever. Didn't matter. Wing place off Highway 190. That crawfish spot in Madisonville that's since closed. Sometimes just standing in his garage, eating sandwiches off a cooler lid while he explained something about an engine I was pretending to understand. We didn't have a place because we didn't need one. Any place worked.
That's the thing you lose. Not the ability to go somewhere — the ability to go anywhere. When "anywhere" stops being an option, you find your somewhere and you hold onto it like a life raft.
Boulevard is the raft.
But every Thursday, once we're in, none of that matters. It's just me and Dad. Chicken tenders. A mystery drink. And a name that would get us kicked out of polite company.
What do we actually talk about over those tenders?
Everything. Nothing. The ratio depends on the week.
We've talked about the business — CT Solutions, what's working, what needs to change, whether I'm taking on too much or not enough. He has opinions. He always has opinions, and most of them are right, which is annoying. The Colonel didn't build F-117s and F-16s by being wrong about load-bearing things. His engineering brain applies to everything, including my client list.
We've talked about the spinal cord stimulator — the implant I got on Valentine's Day 2023, which is a whole story unto itself. He was in the room for parts of that, in the way he's in the room for the hard things: not hovering, not dramatizing, just present. Solid. Available. At Thursday that week, he asked one question: "Is it working?" I said it was helping. He nodded. And we named the cocktail "The Stimulated Gentleman" and moved on.
We've talked about Delta. That one's harder. We don't get to Thursday the week after April 8, 2024, both of us pretending. We just... sat there for a while. The tenders came. Charlie slid the mystery drink over without his usual flourish — he could tell. We named it something quiet that week. I don't even remember what. Something that didn't try too hard.
Sometimes the tradition holds space for the grief. That's what you want from a ritual — not that it erases the hard stuff, but that it gives the hard stuff a place to go.
We talk about Mom. About Beka. About what the weather's going to do next week, which is always wrong and always discussed with great confidence by both of us. We talk about whatever's in the news, which we disagree on with the specific affection of two people who know each other well enough to fight about something and not mean it.
He asks how I'm doing. Not in the casual way. In the "I'm your dad and I need the real answer" way. And I give it to him, more honestly than I give it to most people. That developed over time. It's a Thursday thing.
The old man doesn't treat me different. Never has. He doesn't hover. Doesn't ask if I need help every two minutes. Doesn't do that thing people do where their eyes dart to the chair and back again like they're expecting it to bite someone. He just shows up, sits down, and talks shit like he always did.
That's love in our family. Not the Hallmark card version. Not the long speech about how proud you are. Not the group text with the heart emojis. The love in our family is the "I'm going to roast you until you can't breathe" version. The version that says you're fine without ever having to say a word. The version that says I'm not scared of you or for you — and that might be the most valuable thing anyone has ever given me.
There's a quiet significance to being treated like you're fine when most of the world treats you like you're fragile.
The accident changed a lot of relationships. You find out fast who your people are. Some couldn't look me in the eye anymore. Some cried every single time they saw me — for years — and eventually I started dreading those visits because I'd spend the whole time managing their grief instead of just being present. Some ghosted entirely. Easier that way, I suppose.
Dad never did any of that. He recalibrated. He engineered around the new parameters the same way he'd engineer around any other obstacle. "If you can't use your hands, we'll change the controls." That's the whole philosophy. No eulogy for the old version. Just: what do we need to build?
I'll tell you what he built first, before Thursdays were even a thought. He built a van. Not hired someone to build a van — he built one. Lowered floor, ramp that folds out, tie-downs for the chair, hand controls on the steering column. The man who used to rebuild carburetors in the driveway turned his engineering brain loose on the problem of "how does my son get to the bar." And he solved it the way he solves everything: with his hands and a refusal to accept no.
He never called it love. He called it "the van project." But I know what it was.
Thursday is what we built after that.
I want to say something about what this means. Not the cocktail names — those are self-explanatory. I mean the whole thing. The pattern. The fact that every week, without exception, this man drives to Covington, sits across from me, and does the thing we've always done.
He wasn't built to talk about feelings. Not because he doesn't have them — the Colonel has more heart than most people I know. But the Air Force doesn't give you a feelings curriculum. You are given a mission, resources, a team, and an objective. You achieve it. You report back.
In the parking garage at the hospital in Atlanta, after the accident — I've been told, because I wasn't fully present for all of it — he didn't cry in front of me. He was the one holding everyone else together. Because that's what he does. The mission was "my son is alive, let's figure out what comes next," and he executed.
What I know is that four years later, he was sitting across from me at Boulevard, laughing until he couldn't see straight because Charlie had made something he described as "legally questionable," and we named it something I will not repeat because this book has some standards.
That's the man. He couldn't say what he needed to say in the parking garage. So he built a van. And then he showed up on a Thursday. And then he showed up again the next Thursday. And by the time we had a routine — a real one, with a bar and a bartender and a napkin on the wall — he had said everything he needed to say without saying a word.
The Thursday tradition is him loving me the way he knows how. That's the whole thing. That's all it is.
And it's enough. It's more than enough. It's everything.
We didn't build it intentionally. Like I said — rituals like this sneak up on you. But I think there's something to the fact that it's simple. Tenders. A drink. A bad name. A laugh.
In a life that requires a lot of complexity just to function, simplicity is radical. The Thursday ritual isn't important because of what it is — it's important because of what it isn't. It isn't medical. It isn't logistical. It isn't planning or problem-solving or future-proofing. It's just two guys at a bar, doing the thing they've always done.
My dad and I sat across from each other long before the chair. We'd argue about football, talk about business, give each other grief over whatever was in the news. The chairs have changed — I'm lower now, which makes for genuinely terrible eye contact with most tables, but Boulevard has the right ones — and the conversations have deepened. But the core of it is identical to something that existed before July 4th, 2009.
That's the gift.
Not every Thursday goes smoothly. There are weeks where I'm in pain and I don't want to talk about it, and Dad knows better than to ask. There are weeks where the cocktail lands flat and we can barely muster a laugh for the name. There are weeks where everything hurts and getting out of the house required more than it should have.
There was one Thursday — maybe six weeks ago — where I almost canceled. Spasms had been bad all day. The kind that make your whole body feel like it's arguing with itself. I texted Dad, "Might not make it tonight." He texted back one word: "Tenders."
That's it. Tenders.
I went. The cocktail was mediocre. We named it "The Participation Trophy." Fitting. But I sat there for two hours and by the end of it I felt like a person again instead of a patient. That's what showing up does. It doesn't fix anything. It just reminds you that you're still in the game.
We still go.
Because sometimes showing up is the whole thing. The act of going is the message. It says: the ritual matters more than my mood. It says: I'm not letting the bad weeks win. It says: you're worth the checklist.
People ask me sometimes what keeps me going. They expect a big answer. Some philosophy. Some motivational one-liner they can screenshot and post. And I get it — the question makes sense. Quadriplegic, chronic pain, the daily grind of a body that requires a user manual just to operate. What keeps you going?
Chicken tenders on a Thursday.
I know how that sounds. But I mean it. The big stuff — purpose, legacy, proving people wrong — that fuel burns hot but it burns out. The small stuff is what actually sustains you. The laugh at a bar name nobody else will ever understand. The way Charlie slides that third drink across without a word. The fact that my dad drove across town and is sitting right there, same as last week, same as next week.
That's the answer. It's not profound. It's not inspirational. It's a plate of tenders and a drink called "The Vanilla Violation."
And I wouldn't trade it for anything.
Charlie slides the third drink across the bar. We swirl it. We sniff it. We take a small, overly serious sip like we've got any idea what we're tasting.
"Floral," Dad says.
"And something... mischievous," I say.
He nods gravely. "We need a name."
The gears turn. The stupider the better.
And for fifteen minutes on a Thursday in Covington, the chair doesn't exist. The pain doesn't exist. The checklists don't exist.
It's just Dad. And a terrible name for a cocktail. And the best meal of the week.
Couldn't recommend it more. Every family should have a Thursday.