THE MAGICAL DINER

I have a diner. I have a booth in the diner too. I recently started watching the entire Seinfeld series so this feels special, like a NYC writer’s rite of passage. My booth is the second one from the front—the Paris booth with the broken overhead lamp. It has character, like me. It’s behind the James Dean booth with the quote, “Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.” I guess, is what I thought when I first read it. My booth is across from the eclectic booth with a Yankee memories collage, a medium-sized mirror contrived of smaller mirror pieces, and an odd artistic overhead lamp that is more robotic than it is art. I like looking at it though; It’s how I picked my booth. 

This is the kind of diner that pumps out copious amounts of filter coffee. I imagine back in the day there would be a pool of tiny creamer containers and pink, yellow, and blue sugar-alternative packets collected. They even play back in the day music on a small black radio with an antenna. What I like most is how high the booth seats are. It’s pretty private with the exception of the booth across from you. Always Something There to Remind Me plays simultaneously with some sort of metal banging, plates clinking sound coming from the open kitchen. I cannot see because I’m facing the front. The bar stool seating where the love making of fatty, salty homestyle dishes take place is behind me and there’s more seating behind that where most people go to sit, but I’m a fan of the street view up front. Let the Music Play comes on and I accidently drop a piece of bacon on the floor and grimace over the good waste. I only eat bacon on occasion and treasure it when I do. The butter on my toast is thick and plentiful, too plentiful for my taste, so I scrape some of it off and use the same knife to scoot the last of the skillet potatoes onto my fork. I wasn’t raised to eat with both a knife and a fork. It still makes me think about that fact whenever I do it. Like no matter how much time has gone by, it’ll never be second-nature for me.

Jessie’s Girl is now playing and I realize my coffee is getting cold. To the side of it is a cylinder of white shimmering sugar that makes my stomach turn and my lips twist just looking at it. I can’t believe I used to use that stuff. It’s been over a decade, and I can practically describe it like it was now: the way the little flap at the top pops open when you tip the cylinder upside down and then the tiny white sand barges out in a perfectly contained group like there’s an invisible slide gliding the path. I move the jelly packet off the toast like it offended me. I doubt it’s clean. I doubt anyone cares about where it started before they made it a normal thing to put on the same plate with the toast and before I can go down a rabbit hole about this dirty Smucker’s packet, Bon Jovi comes on, Livin’ On A Prayer, and I’m back happy again. Smiling, feeling the nostalgia with the only difference being the coffee I’m drinking which the server, a short and kind man from Mexico, has already asked me if I wanted a refill on. It’s been five or six songs now, so what’s that, twenty-ish minutes…I do not need to drink more than one cup of coffee in a twenty-minute time span I can tell you that. Swirls have started to form on the top just as I See Your True Colors Shining Through comes on. What perfect timing to distinguish the shades of brown in my thick white mug. I look up from my laptop to see a beautiful tree peering at me from outside, still green, unlike many of the other trees that are far too empty and orange for it to be only October and then September by Earth Wind and Fire comes on and I know that this is what magic feels like. 

I take the server up on his offer of more coffee—it’s been nine songs now okay, and I rest my head on the gold oriental flower cushion and let the words of What About Love by Heart serenade my worries away.