Denmo's

On the way down to see my daughter for parent’s day, we stopped forty minutes away at a hot dog stand I had heard good things about in Southbury, Connecticut.  I used to go to Southbury all the time when I was a kid and my grandparents lived in Heritage Village, one of the first senior communities of its kind that was built back in 1967,  It has over a thousand acres and houses nearly 5,000 people.  I loved seeing my grandparents.  They would take me to the shopping center there and the Atticus book store, where I could choose any book I wanted and they would buy it for me.  My grandparents have been dead for at least 40 years now. Maybe 50.  My grandfather got Parkinson's and had to be put in a nursing home.  He hardly lasted a month.  My grandmother went into assisted living, fell and broke her hip and passed away shortly after.  I imagined meeting there at Denmo’s for a hot dog, and how proud they would be of their great granddaughter away at college, and it was a beautiful fall morning.  I ordered a foot long dog with onions.  The smiling woman behind the window joked that I should wait for her to call my number as we were the only ones there at 11 in the morning.  

Denmo’s has been on that Southbury roadside since 1978, after my grandparent’s time there.  If it was older I am sure it was the kind of place they would have taken me.  Their dogs are charred and split.  Mine was very good, good in a way that I wanted to have another one, but it was time to get back on the road and my grandparents were no longer there.