Road Trip - A Look before the Leap

The author thanks Bellasarius Productions, Universal Studios and any other creative entities responsible for Quantum Leap.

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Day Nine - Feasts and Facts

After going to Ft. Wayne for some specialized ingredients Al started Italian Cooking 101 with Thelma, Deb and Katie sitting in rapt attention hoping to learn some new recipes. He started with homemade pasta. How they managed to find semolina flour was beyond him, but the Admiral began to see that Indiana wasn't the end of the universe. However, he was a little miffed. "You know, where are the guys? Men need to know how to cook, too." A big bowl of flour and eggs was in front of him and he began mixing.

Deb joked, "Oh, not in the Midwest. Men here only eat."

He was going to have fun with all the girls and truthfully, he didn't want the guys around. When he was in full flirt mode, other men were just annoying. "Real men cook for their ladies."

Katie pretended to write down the quote. "Tell me, Admiral, do they clean too?"

When he was surrounded by women, he became their most willing servant. After all, he wasn't stupid. "Yes, he cleans house. He waits on her and treats her like the queen she is."

Thelma was entranced. "I can't believe you make your own pasta dough."

"It's a thousand times better than the stuff you buy, but you got to use semolina flour." He kept working the dough. "It's not hard to make and cooks in a few seconds. You'll see."

Deb always seemed to be laughing. "I will have a hard time convincing the Women's Auxiliary at church that an astronaut taught me to make fettuccine."

He picked up a nearby rolling pin. "That was my one gripe with NASA. The food they sent along with us was terrible." He began to roll out the dough. "Okay, now you want to get the dough thin, but for fettuccine it still has to have a little bite to it." With the actions of a practiced chef, the glob turned into a square yard of pasta. He rolled it up around the rolling pin and pulled the pin out. "Now, here's how you make fettuccine without a lot of work." He cut thin slices of dough and when he'd gotten through it all, he started tossing it with a little more flour and suddenly the table was filled with fettuccine. "E la!" He bowed to the round of applause. "Grazie, grazie!" He washed his hands and announced. "Okay, while the pasta dries out a bit, we make the Bolognese."

The rest of the afternoon they cooked, laughed, made memories and some really good food. When six o'clock rolled around, they all convened for one last dinner together. Dave began the meal as he began them all, with a prayer. "Dear Lord, we have been blessed this week with Your grace and goodness. We have seen the end of a destructive relationship and we thank You for Your intervention. That intervention came in the form of someone we now call our brother. Thank You for sending Al to our home. We pray he will always know this is his home as well as ours. We are thankful that our family can come together to laugh and sing and to love and to enjoy a fabulous Italian banquet. So, before everyone begins to get mad at me for making the spaghetti get cold, I will say, Lord God, we thank You for all good things You provide. We will work and pray for the time when people everywhere shall have the abundance they need. Amen."

One again, Al was touched by the minister's words. "You know, Dave, you almost give organized religion a good name."

He put a heap of fettuccine on his plate and said, "That must be what one calls damning with faint praise. Now, someone pass me the meatballs."

So they ate, yet again and this time the dishes were left to wait until time together wasn't so precious. No songs tonight, just music playing in the background, a subtle support for tender words and loving conversations between families and friends. Al was given the place of honor in their circle, the new family elder.

Jason had one more question before the night ended. "Admiral, when did you know you wanted to join the Navy?"

"I'm not really sure. It wasn't so much that I wanted to join the Navy. Mostly, I wanted to learn how to fly an airplane. Took me almost two years to convince my representative to write a letter of recommendation for me to get into Annapolis."

Tom asked, "You were twenty when you got into Annapolis?"

"No, I was 18. I worked for a couple of years before I went to school."

Sam wondered, "When did you get out of high school?"

"I was 16. I had to graduate. The orphanage threw me out at 16. If I hadn't finished school by then I might not have been able to graduate."

New information about his friend was always welcome. "Okay, there's got to be a story there."

There was a great story, a part of his life that he rarely talked about, something that was going to surprise the hell out of Sam. "Sam, you played piano in Carnegie Hall when you were 19, right?"

Typically self-deprecating Sam said, "Yeah, I was a novelty act."

"When I was 16, I was a working actor off Broadway."

Sam had been taken in by the Admiral more times than he wanted to admit to. He wasn't going to fall for this. "But Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was a movie, not a play."

Yet another crack about his height. "Bigger is not always better, Sam. Being small made me a pretty hot commodity in New York. I was 16, but I could play as young as 12. Producers and directors liked that a lot. At 16, they didn't have to educate me and being an orphan, I was emancipated and could sign my own contracts."

It was another tall tale. Sam didn't believe him. "You were not an actor."

There was enough weirdness in this part of his life that he didn't need to exaggerate. He simply told them, "I was an actor. The biggest thing I did was a revival of Our Town the summer before I started at Annapolis. I played George Gibb. I also did a few weeks in the King and I when the kid playing Chulalongkorn got appendicitis."

Thelma gasped, "With Yul Brynner?"

With a slightly shy shrug, Al said, "Yeah, only for a couple of weeks.

His buddy had a hard time believing him. "Yeah, right, you were on Broadway in a major musical?"

The Admiral stood his ground. "Yes, I was."

"With your voice?"

"Chulalongkorn doesn't sing. He just has to be princely. I did princely very well."

Sam was finally starting to think Al wasn't kidding. "You're serious?"

Al looked at Katie who sat on the floor nearby. "You had to grow up with this?"

Katie nodded sadly, "Alas, it wasn't easy." Then she laughed and slapped Sam on the knee. "You are not the only multi-talented person in the world, dear brother."

Things began to fall into place to Sam. "No wonder you can just get up in front of people and sing. You have no shame! You're an actor!"

"I guess that's one way of looking at it. I'd prefer to think that I'm supremely self-confident." He gulped down some decaf, "And rightly so!"

Katie leaned against Al's chair, her head resting against his knee. "Thank God for that." The Admiral had another conquest, this young woman whose life would be forever better. There was no backing out now even if he wanted to. Al was a card-carrying member of the clan Beckett.

It was late and the guests would be leaving after breakfast so despite no one really wanting to, they all went to their rooms to get some sleep before the morning came too soon.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE: All rights to this story are reserved. Neither the whole nor parts (with exception of short excerpts for review purposes) may be published elsewhere without written permission from the author. Thank you.