DATE: Saturday, August 2, 1997              TAG: 9708020006

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B9   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Kerry Dougherty 

                                            LENGTH:   98 lines

SAYING FAREWELL TO FAMILIAR PLACES WE CHOSE TO INGNORE THE WARNING SIGNS, JUST AS MOST OF US NEVER NOTICE HOW FRAGILE AND OLD OUR PARENTS ARE UNTIL THEY'RE NEARLY GONE.

There are places I remember

All my life though some have changed

Some forever not for better

Some have gone and some remain.

All these places have their moments

With lovers and friends I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living

In my life I've loved them all.

Lennon/McCartney

A few weeks ago the 117-year-old F. W. Woolworth chain announced that it was closing its remaining 400 five-and-dime stores around the country because they were losing so much money. The outpouring of affection for these old standbys was surprising.

Upon hearing the news, Virginia Beach customers sadly strolled the Woolworth aisles, expressing a deep emptiness.

``I think it's terrible,'' cried one customer.

``It's kind of sad, like part of the family is gone,'' moaned another.

``This is someplace we love to go,'' said one woman. ``When the old names keep going like this, it's scary.''

One women gathered up armfuls of sewing notions to purchase, even though she hadn't sewn in two decades. She just wanted to hold onto a little piece of F. W. Woolworth.

This week I had a similar experience, a commercial loss that left me feeling strangely off-kilter.

It's the sale of a little Chinese restaurant in Virginia Beach where, for the past 12 years, I've done everything but the dishes.

Oh, I've eaten at better restaurants, fancier establishments, places with linen tablecloths and trendy cuisine and staggeringly expensive food. But this unassuming Chinese restaurant, with its garish decor and gingery smells, has been my favorite. The formica tables are set with paper place mats embossed with the Chinese zodiac, and the laminated menus are yellowed with age. The chef there can whip up a platter of kung pao chicken so delicious it could make you cry.

My husband and I have eaten at this little restaurant scores, maybe hundreds of times since we met in 1985, and he was eating there years before he met me. We've celebrated more birthdays, pay raises, court victories and no-homework nights there than I can remember. When I was pregnant, I'd duck in on my way home from work to take out quarts of their hot and sour soup, which I craved above all else.

It was there my children learned to eat with chopsticks and there my mother told me last spring she had inoperable lung cancer. A couple of years ago when I was overwhelmed with Christmas chores my husband suggested we go to the Chinese restaurant for Christmas dinner.

So you see, the place is filled with memories for me.

This unpretentious restaurant is as comfortable as an old shoe. I never had a bad meal there and never remember a cross word ever being spoken during dinner. Every time I walked in the door, I knew the owner was happy to see me.

The food, which will soon be just a memory, was fresh and pungent. The thought of crunchy pickled cabbage spiced with red hot peppers makes my mouth water; and the sweet and tangy orange beef had a flavor so delicate you never wanted to stop eating it.

Last Wednesday, my husband and I met there for lunch as is our custom when the midweek urge for Chinese food is overpowering. As we lingered over our hot tea, the owner approached our table with the check and, in a quavering voice, told us the bad news: She had sold the business. The next day would be her last.

I was dumbstruck.

We should have seen this coming. The signs of the restaurant's decline were everywhere: in the half-empty dining room in the evening and the installation of the lunchtime buffet. We chose to ignore these warning signs, just as most of us never notice how fragile and old our parents are until they're nearly gone.

Instead, we shunned the buffet and stubbornly ordered from the menu as the overfed waddled by our table toward the groaning heaps of mass-produced Chinese food.

``How's business?'' we would sometimes ask the owner at dinner time. She would shrug and gamely smile at the empty tables dotting the dining room.

In an age of franchises and bigger-is-better, this little restaurant with its eager waiters struggling mightily with the English language was a safe and happy corner of our world. As I think back on all the pleasant memories we've shared inside that restaurant, I ache with the loss of such a place.

In the parking lot on Wednesday, I expressed relief that we'd eaten there that day. What if we'd found out by chance that the restaurant had been sold?

``We'd have coped,'' my husband said, giving me one of those ``Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars'' looks.

Sure, we'd have coped. But if I'd known that last week's plate of kung pao chicken was the last I'd eat there, I would have savored it more. If I had known before the waiter cleared our table that this was our last lunch there, I would have saved my paper place mat.

Suddenly I remembered the woman at Woolworths, gathering thread she'd never use just to cling to the familiar.

I know just how she felt. MEMO: Ms. Dougherty is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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