The plum blossoms will scatter

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

In the busy Salt Lake City law firm where I have worked for the last third of a century, lunch often is just one more item on a long list of tasks to complete. This is a quintessentially American sin, and I am a red, white, and blue recidivist.

True to form, about noon one recent autumn day, hunger pried me away from the strong gravitational pull of my desk and computer. I left my high rise office building, determined to spend as little time as possible in search of the mandatory midday meal. It was an oft-repeated journey; one a clever peer once had nicknamed “the quest for the dreaded bagel.” 

As usual, I trusted that my long stride and quick gait would deliver me to one of the half-dozen rotating take-it-to-go places I usually patronized. Instead, for some inexplicable reason, I stopped at an old abandoned building on Main Street. I looked up and read a sign: “Since 1919 Lamb’s Grill.” 

Instantly, I was transported back in time almost fifty years. I saw my pre-teen self, sitting with my family, at a table covered with white linen and surrounded by a wooden booth upholstered in red leather. I surveyed a menu that included unusual fare like Finnan haddie, braised lamb shank, liver and onions, and rice pudding. It was the mid-1970s, and we were in the pleasant dining company of a Catholic priest named Frederick Draeger.

We had met him when he was pastor at St. Rose of Lima in Layton, Utah, a charming, red-brick-and-wood chapel built in about 1947. The church, established to serve the growing Catholic population assigned to nearby Hill Air Force Base, fittingly featured a gold-lettered inscription on its interior wooden ceiling beams: “I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith.” 

Father Draeger was a Paulist (Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle) priest from New Jersey who discovered his vocation later in life after serving in the Air Force and working as a wax engraver in New York City. The famous Catholic television star (and prospective saint) New York Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, ordained him in 1953.

Father Draeger was a relentlessly kind family friend. He comforted and counseled my mother when her 20-year marriage ended in divorce, and helped her obtain a Catholic annulment. He took my friends and me on camping trips and later helped me fund my college education. He was a devoted dog owner, and traveled far and wide in his VW camper with his faithful dachshund companion named “Bertha.”

In his later years, Father Draeger directed the Catholic Center and Paraclete Gift Shop on Main Street in downtown Salt Lake City, a small bookstore that also offered daily Mass for local workers and businesspeople. We occasionally visited him at the center, which now has been replaced by a high-rise office tower.

During these visits, he would take us to lunch at nearby Lamb’s Grill, Utah’s oldest restaurant, opened in 1919 by a Greek immigrant named George Lamb. It was a longstanding favorite meeting place for Salt Lake City’s legal, business, and political communities. The dining room even featured a portrait of George Washington, a 1931 gift to the owner from then Utah Governor George H. Dern. The restaurant remained essentially unchanged since 1939. 

Ironically, I later joined a law firm with offices right across the street, and so I also went to Lamb’s as an adult, in the waning years of the twentieth century. I even took my small children there for corned beef and cabbage after Salt Lake’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade. The “old fashioned look” of the place intrigued them, but they were afraid to use the tiny restrooms under the stairs that led to the restaurant’s office.

Those children are all grown now and my own dear mother died in 2007. Father Draeger passed away in 1981, far too young, after complications from open heart surgery. He was only 68 years old. St. Rose church was torn down several years later and replaced with townhomes that bear no golden inspirational inscription. 

Lamb’s lasted a little bit longer, closing in 2017, just two years shy of its centennial year. I had not thought about Lamb’s, or Father Draeger, for many years, until that recent day when I stumbled upon the abandoned and lifeless storefront during another routine effort to cross lunch off my daily to-do list.

I was looking for food, but insight was on the menu instead. I realized immediately how much I missed, and perhaps took for granted, those lunches with Father Draeger and my family. I yearned for just one more. I had to settle instead for a cold turkey sandwich at Subway. I walked back to my office alone. 

I lack the wherewithal to reincarnate Lamb’s Grill or its memorable past joys. It is within my meager powers, however, to create new “Lamb’s moments” with other people in other places. And I stand admonished by the ancient haiku of Japanese monk-poet Ryokan Taigu:

“I must go there today –

Tomorrow the plum blossoms

Will scatter.”

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is writing a book about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah.