DINER SCENES

The Diner Scenes photo series started in Mountain View, MO. We stopped in to eat lunch at a small town diner where we were the youngest people in the place. An older couple who looked to be about my parents’ age sat at a table near the window and talked to the two elderly women sitting at a table next to them. The man had the look and shape of my dad, white hair, rounded body. I could hear snippets of their conversation, talking about their younger days. He said that he and his wife had started dating when she was fifteen. “I pretty much wouldn’t let her look at anyone else.” I snapped a picture, light pouring in the windows, my lens slightly smudged. It was enough to give me the idea to keep the photos going. Each photo would be an incomplete list of all the food we ate during our travels.

We’ve been home three whole days, driving back from New Orleans in one shot. Josephine is curled up on my feet and snoring, exhausted from her week at Terry’s. Groceries have been purchased, house has been cleaned and laundry is done. I’m trying to gather my thoughts on New Orleans that isn’t just about food. We ate boiled crawfish in a town just before we hit New Orleans. We just stopped at a roadside convenience store and ordered two pounds of crawfish. Then we stood outside, using the tailgate of the truck as a table, peeling and eating crawfish as fast as we could. I took Michael to the places I remembered like Cafe Du Monde and Frank’s. Then there were new places like Willie Mae’s Scotch House where we stood outside waiting for almost two hours for fried chicken, catfish and the best butter beans I’ve ever eaten. That was the same day we stumbled onto a local’s bar in the French Quarter. We were the only tourists sitting at their outside tables. The drinks were cheap and the company was priceless. We stayed too long, saw a parade, drank too much. By the time we left, we couldn’t get into any nearby restaurants and Michael led me into a fast food fried chicken place called Willie’s. He ordered me catfish, but when I took a bite, I said “This tastes like chicken!” Then Michael looked at my food and said “That’s because it is chicken.” He made a move to go correct the mistake, but I shrugged and said “I’m eating this.” Then I proceeded to happily (tipsily) eat all of the four chicken tenders.

I was so drunk, I ate chicken and didn’t care.

We bought some art and walked twenty thousand or more steps a day. I got a sunburn. We rode the streetcar and the bus. We went to the art museum and the cemeteries. I took pictures, the kind of pictures I want to print and hang on the walls. I had my palms and tarot cards read by a woman in Jackson Square. She told me things I already knew like how I’m my worse enemy and I’m really good at my job. She saw my broken heart. She told me “You have a broken heart and you’re still holding onto that.” What’s funny about that is that I would not remember until we were home that I had forgotten what would have been my twenty fourth wedding anniversary with Chris. Michael and I were tailgating with crawfish and I was introducing him to New Orleans on that day. This seems appropriate for being in a city that is the same as the last time I was there, yet completely different. I’m like New Orleans before and after the hurricane.

And just like that, we’re home. Cleaning gutters and chicken coops. Responding to work emails and cleaning out inboxes. Meal prepping and gearing up for a return to an old routine. Right now, I have ‘couch/TV time’ scheduled on my calendar and I’ve settled in with my coffee and CBS Sunday Morning. Right now, I’m dreaming of strolling down the streets of the French Quarter.