Yesterday my grandmother took the three of us, my brother, sister, and I, out to eat at a pleasant bistro on the other side of town. The cheerful waitress handed out our menus, and it dawned on me what a strange thing it is to eat out. I tend to agree with Tolkien’s words in the mouth of Bilbo Baggins: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, stepping out of your own front door.”
You leave your home, where you might have had homemade spaghetti, and drive thirty minutes to a building primarily designed preparing food and hosting the people who eat the food. After being seated in a room full of strangers, you choose a dish from a menu arrayed with sometimes familiar, sometimes foreign dishes, none of them like your mother makes.
After waiting with usually pleasant conversation, you get your food and try to eat it with some semblance of manners, even though your sandwich is greasier and unreasonably larger than anything you ever attempt to eat in the private confines of your home. If you are paying, and are as mathmatically strained as I am, you might be mentally calculating the tip for the last half of the meal.
You can’t finish your fries but think your little brother might enjoy them later. A waiter produces a to-go box, which you fill but inevitably leave on the table among the used napkins and crinkled straw wrappers.
Despite all this, there is a certain appeal to the restaurant experience. As I sat with my siblings and grandmother at our table for four, surveying the menu, I thought about how nice it was to be here, in a new place, to be served food, to have conversation. I admired the mix of tall windows at the front of the long room with high brick walls, and dark wood floors, the light coming in on the tables.
Connor was talking about the character of Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, whom Grammie and I both shared his admiration for, and Mattie will admire as soon as she reads the book this semester for English, I’m sure.
I noted the misfortune of coming to a restaurant nice enough to have cloth napkins, which I could not, with good conscience, wipe my nose with. I could feel the beginnings of a drip. I never have a Kleenex when I most need it. Not even a scrap of paper, and the waitress was approaching us.
Oh Dear Most Venerated Abby, I composed mentally, when one is without a Kleenex in public, which is the most appropriate and acceptable course of action—wipe with the hand or leave it there and hope no one will notice? I chose the former, thinking of the times I was sure I had something the size of a blimp extending from a nostril when in fact it wasn’t even noticeable. Of course there are those other times when a kind relatives enlightens you about the booger dangling precariously from that same place...
“Shreddedsteaksandwich,” I blurted when my turn came, averting my eyes and hoping she wouldn’t look at my face, particularly the middle section of it, which I was positive must be dripping. “Fries or onion rings?” she persisted. “Fries,” I shot back, picking up my purse and excusing myself to the ladies room.
The restroom was painted in warm, comforting red, and made a good place for me to find relief in a large wad of paper towel, with which I duly punished my nose for its untimely behavior.
After that the meal was peaceful. You aren’t paying all that money for food. It’s an hour of atmosphere you’re buying, an opportunity almost to be expansive and creative and inspired by the sights and people around you, and to enjoy the friends you came with. You meet over such a seemingly insignificant thing as food, and sometimes even your souls can connect.
We left happy, having chatted about books and life and the coming semester, my sandwich successfully consumed, with the floor sullied only by one stray slice of mushroom.
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