Mother's day snapshots

So, I asked my mother what she wanted to do this year for Mother's day. "Let's go to the buffet at the casino," she tells me. I groan, but go. It's her day after all, right?
Last year it was a bit more tony, but this year it was strictly downmarket.

Here are some highlights:

In the parking lot, I park next to a ubiquitous white pickup truck, with its windows rolled up tight.
Inside, I see a fifty something year old black man in a baseball cap, half slumped over the wheel, sleeping or dead....with a cigarette burning its way to his lip.

"You're going to park next to that!?" My mother asks, alarmed.
"I'm tired of driving around." I answer. We'd driven fruitlessly around the lot for what seemed like forever.
"Well, don't blame me when we come back and find your car burned!" she huffs.

Upon entering, the sign warns us ominously:
"No firearms"
"No sleeveless t-shirts"
"No masks or plastic face coverings"
"No bedroom slippers"

You just know that a masked, bedroom slippered sleeveless t-shirt woman got caught one day smuggling a firearm in her purse.

In the elevator, a sixty something woman with cotton candy thinning hair, dyed a nice shade of burgundy, drives in on a motorized scooter, with her daughter and the oxygen tank in tow. She wheezes through the plastic tubes in her nose for my mother to "press 2, darlin'. Thanks."

In the dining room, we're seated across from a family reunion of what look like carnies.

My mother shoves me in the arm. "Tien ca," she tells me (using the French as she does when she tries to be discreet).
"Look at that!"
I look.
It's a late twenty something white female. She's skinny, but nine months pregnant. She's been squeezed into a long white figure hugging dress.

Crocheted.

She looks like an anaconda who's just eaten a gazelle, in white crochet.

"You think she did that dress herself?" my mother sneers.

"I don't know about the dress," I tell her, "but it looks like she did that tattoo herself." It's a large tattoo on her shoulder, reading "Doodie."

She's got a Deliverance style buzz cut and looks scarily similar to the father of her fetus. She's eating an ice cream cone, staring blankly ahead, practically giving it a blow job while her grandfather (in overalls, no less) looks on.

I try to down my mashed potatoes.