Ojalá, Selah, Lateda

Lunch with a Book

The kids started school today. I could not let myself miss out on taking the littlest S to her first day of Kindergarten so I asked for a half day off. Getting them settled into their new classes was uneventful, none of us came close to shedding a tear, and I was at the office by 8:20. Which meant by 12:20 I had worked 4 hours, which is in fact half a day, so I left. The biggest S had to work a double today so I found myself with almost 3 hours all to myself. The last time I had that much time to myself I used it to catch up on sleep, but today I felt pretty rested. I considered coming home to read, write, draw, meditate or perhaps even sunbathe. But I felt more hungry than I did creative and since we spent most of last week in North Carolina our cupboard is decidedly bare. It seemed like I should take myself out to lunch. Our little town really has only half a dozen places to eat that aren’t fast food so it didn’t take me long to run through the food and atmosphere of each in my head and decide that the Chinese place without the buffet was the place I wanted to be.

The restaurant is dark in a soothing kind of way and usually doesn’t have that big of a lunch crowd. Though when I arrived today they had a new big banner advertising a $4.99 lunch special and most of the tables were in use. Along the the far wall they have one long booth with maybe five or six small tables, each with one chair across from them. I was seated at the second one and as I pulled my book out of my purse I looked down to the end of the booth where another woman was sitting by herself eating with a book. She didn’t look up so I re-entered the strange world of Rushdie’s Enchantress of Venice. When I put the book down to order I noticed another woman was being seated to my left, also alone with a book, and before my food had a chance to come a fourth was seated to my right, also with a book. So there we were all lined up along the edge or the restaurant with our lunch specials and our novels. We must have been quite the sight.

My food was good and the story interesting but rather than being comforted by the presence of my fellow solo readers I felt a bit annoyed by them. Perhaps it was because I went in with the idea of treating myself to something out of the ordinary and then realized my experience was actually a very common one.

I would like to continue to write about what this might mean, but my duties as Soccer Mom are calling…