The Bear in the Ladle

Or: what are you looking at?

Photo by Josh Marty on Unsplash

It didn’t matter that the TV screen was almost behind me; there I was, craning my neck to see the score of a football game that I didn’t even care about between two teams I didn’t follow that I hadn’t even known was happening until we walked into the restaurant twenty minutes earlier.

“Hey, Timothy!”

My wife all but snapped her fingers under my nose before I managed to tear my eyes away and focus on her again - this was our anniversary dinner, after all.

Ya, I’ve got a bit of a problem.

I should probably screen restaurants for screens before stepping in the door. But how, exactly, does one go about doing such a thing? “Um, yes, hello, I’m thinking of eating at your establishment tonight, and I’m wondering if you have any TVs in the place. You do? Do you think, um, it’d be possible to just turn those off while I’m there for dinner? Hello? Hello?”

Seems impractical.

We had a nice dinner anyway. Oregon was down to Indiana by about forty points by the time we boxed up our leftover Pad Thai and headed back to our BNB.

We had a nice anniversary trip overall, I’d say, hitting up several bookstores, watching a movie at the theater, watching jeopardy in the evening, watching…ok, we didn’t just watch things. But it turns out screens are hard to get away from.

Our last morning we stopped by a seventy year old diner to grab some brunch before heading toward home. A sign outside boasted “over a millions steaks sold.” When we stepped inside the waiter rushed to clear and clean a booth table for us. We sat and studied the menus - old menus, looked like they might be original menus, if not for the updated prices. At the bar, an older gentleman was reading the comics, a stack of papers at his elbow.

I looked around the building for signs of the establishment’s age: other than some greasy ceiling tiles, everything looked clean, but nothing was updated.

“You know what I’m going to say about this place, right?” I asked my wife. She knew: it’ll be either really good or really bad: bad because it’s lost its way and is just holding on for nostalgia’s sake, or good because the only thing keeping it going is its good food.

John, the owner, was serving tables along with the staff. He took our order, then took a break to sit at his own bar and munch on a pancake. (A white-board by the bathrooms advertised pancakes for a dollar apiece starting at six AM. I imagined John had already been up for six or seven hours).

“Hey look, they have a library!”

I craned my neck to look; sure enough, a single shelf held a number of volumes and a label “Library.” I was a little confused, I admit. I kept looking around. The details of the place began to reveal themselves to me. In the corner, an apparently broken jukebox sat idle. Suspended from the suspended ceiling behind the counter, a Paul Bunyan sized ladle cradled a brown teddy bear in its bowl. Pictures of other diners and ancient buildings dotted the walls. Next to the library sat a stack of the mornings papers, the ones used earlier by the comic-reader, who had now paid his bill and moved on.

John was everywhere, cracking jokes, letting the patrons know what he’d found at the farmers market that was making its way onto the menu this week. The wait staff seemed relaxed, totally at ease in the presence of their boss, indeed, their boss’s presence seemed to make them at ease.

We ate our food - it was very good - and started to talk. We started to relax. We laughed at jokes that probably weren’t very good - but they were good for us - and had no problem maintaining eye-contact with each other. At the bar, a group of three guys, apparently strangers, struck up a conversation, their tone warm and friendly.

When we paid our bill John made a point to swing over and say thank you for our patronage.

Perhaps I didn’t mention - there wasn’t a single screen anywhere in the place. Oh, sure, some of the patrons probably peaked at their phones. But John didn’t provide us with any distractions, any topics of conversation other than what we brought ourselves or found in our surroundings.

I think I figured out the library, too: like the newspapers, it was provided for the use of patrons if they happened to be eating alone. In that place, though, no one was truly eating alone, not because it was an old-fashioned diner, not because it played the soft-rock hits from decades past, not because of nostalgia but because all those things, plus the friendly employees and the boss who clearly loved his job worked together to help us to focus on each other, on other people, and not on a manufactured topic of interest.

I finally figured that out.

I never did figure out the bear in the ladle.

When we stepped outside I noticed another sign under the “over a million steaks sold” sign. It read, simply, “God Bless.”

He already has blessed us.

He blessed us through a seventy year old diner with over a million steaks sold.