Diner Dinner Night

The proverbial "they" say that we take, not make, time for those things that are truly important to us.  I am guilty of saying quite often that I don't have time for this or that when the reality is that I don't take the time for those things.  Consciously or subconsciously what I am saying with my choices is that those things for which "I don't have time" are not priorities in my life.  When I think about those slighted things, sometimes I can say that, yes in indeed, they are not a priority.  In other instances, however, I come face to face with the realization that my life is out of balance.

One thing that we almost always take time for is "Diner Dinner Night" on Thursdays.  It is a endlessly recurring event on all of our calendars.  We meet our best friends at our local greasy spoon diner, share a meal, and catch up on the goings on in each other's lives.

Some nights we are in and out in an hour and others we sit and chat for several hours.  Those longer visits are great because they usually include dessert!  The food is typical diner food - burgers, all-day breakfast, chicken fried anything, and good old home cookin' vegetables and awesome desserts.  The ambiance is typical old fashioned diner ambiance.

Our Thursday evenings really are about neither the food nor the ambiance.  They are about the company.  They are about friendship.

It's funny to me that this sign greets us on our way in.

No.  We don't have reservations: yet if we miss a night or if one of our group is missing, the staff notices and asks if everyone is good.  We no longer have to order our beverages.  We sit down at our favorite table and the server, whomever it happens to be that evening, arrives shortly with our drinks.  We aren't quite as predictable with our food orders.  Despite the large number of diner dinner nights that we have had, we all still peruse the menu each week.  It has never changed, but we always look, just in case.

Tonight was definitely an instance of taking time for dinner together rather than having it.  We are all traveling tomorrow.  Our friends are flying out west for a family wedding and we are flying east for a fun weekend.  If we were all honest, I suspect that we all would have agreed that we didn't really have time for dinner together this week.  Between finishing up the work week and packing, we each had many other things that were probably higher priorities than diner dinner night.  That didn't seem to matter.  We took the time.

We met.  We ate.  We shared the goings on of our week so far.  We wished each other safe travels and happy travels.  An hour later we headed our separate ways to finish all those tasks still left on our various to-do lists.

And our parting words were, "See you next week."