I only happened into dinner due to the invitation of a new, lovely friend. What should have been a threesome of food-loving adventurers, turned into a duo, and I think we muscled through that well. I say "muscled" only from my own perspective, and only due to the import of the restaurant, not due to any lack in my companion. I think for anyone saving an experience, they're saving it for something, someone, in particular. They're saving it for a daydream they can't shake.
The food was beautiful, the service attentive without being cloying, and the company, warm and engaging. I usually leave restaurant posts to my Minneapolis/St. Paul blog, The Minneapolite, so I suppose any dedicated reader of both blogs knows there's a different bent to this musing compared to my typical restaurant raves.
The trouble with going somewhere knowing you'll never be back, knowing you could have been a dozen times before, is that you eat the what-ifs as much as the food. The trouble with saving an experience for an unpromised future, some miraculous moment that lends itself to that specific celebration, is that experiencing it without that miraculous moment risks the experience ringing hollow.
Happily, the meal was less bittersweet than I expected. It felt, instead, like acknowledgment that saving such things is, itself, an increasingly hollow exercise for me. Perhaps it's because my Mamaw is in hospice, and because I'm weeks away from 35, and because I saw the Matterhorn this summer, and because my kid sister is graduating from college, but dinner felt more like a reminder that little is promised us on any given day. Future-oriented dreams are powerful, beautiful things. But they also cloud our ability to embrace the day God made. This day. The one we're currently in.
My dad blogs, too. And he volunteers at a local hospice. He comforts the dying and their families, and he answers phones and listens to the stories of people without too many days left to tell stories. In a recent post he mentioned being some folks' "last new friend," and that pierced me. What an honored thing, to be the last new friend, to anchor a moment like that. I'm not equating moments. I'm not comparing the eating of a meal at a storied restaurant to the connection made between a friend bound for Heaven and one still (thanks to God) likely earth bound for a while yet. But my dad's post, and his comment, made me sensitive to the time allowed us, the slipperiness of it all.
Daydreams are good and lovely things. Days are longer without them. But when they lend themselves to saving experiences for some unpromised end, they run the risk of keeping us from the dream altogether. Saving La Belle Vie for something special meant I only had the chance to love it once, when I could have loved it dearly many times over the last few years. It's a mistake I'll try hard not to repeat.
Special can be a Tuesday. It can be a new friend.
