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I went up the coast of Maine last week and came across a wonderful little café and it was so good I pulled out my pad and pen and sat writing for a couple hours. I like to write with people nearby but not involved with me personally. The waitress was all business, she greeted me by saying, "Yeah?"
I asked if they served lunch. She said, "Yeah. Take a seat."
I'd had a bad encounter with a lobster roll the day before so I ordered a garden salad and a grilled cheese. "With chicken or crab?" she said. I said, "Crab." Crab is not lobster.
The salad was fresh. Greens, tomato chunks, slices of cucumber. Croutons. But fresh, not shipped in cellophane bags from Croatia. And the sandwich was just fine. And so was the blueberry pie Ă la mode.
What I loved though wasn't the food but the ambience. I sat in the dark interior looking out an open door to a bright sunny boardwalk and marina and the Atlantic.
Younger people sat under an awning out there. My generation, indoors. The customers were stocky people, good eaters, shorts and sneakers. A chorus of children's voices from a kiddie area about 30 feet away. Kids eat fast and then want to hang with other kids and they were busy jousting and teasing, squealing, playing with puzzles, while the grown-ups sat at tables and conversed and I sat looking out the door, aware that I was in a crowded room of happy Americans enjoying lunch, children shrieking, infants tossing out syllables, parents declaiming or describing their day, the light laughter of women, and out the door the basso rumble of boats' engines, heading out of harbor. To listen to crowd vocalization, like musical notes, flutes, bassoons, violas, a few violins, a composition titled "Lunch Hour," simultaneous happy talk, I felt uplifted.
This is one of the happiest summers of my very long life. My wife installed WhatsApp on my phone and it dings and I pick up and she talks to me from the wine country of Portugal where she's hiking with her brother and his wife, on their way to a baptism and pig roast. Sometimes my daughter comes on and says, "Make me laugh," so I tell her about the woman at Yellowstone Park who was chased by a bear and the park rangers arrested her for running with a bear behind. She laughs.
I'm an old man, I have no ambition whatsoever but I love my work. I do 90 minutes of stand-up, I go back to the hotel and work on my novel, and in the morning I repeat it. The audience laughs a lot and then I have hours of pure silence occasionally interrupted by the voice of the woman I love lying in her hotel room in a heat wave in Portugal and recounting her days' adventures. Or my little girl needing a joke. So a woman was hit by a car and lay in the street bleeding and someone yelled, "Call a priest!" The woman said, "No, I'm Unitarian." Someone yelled, "Then call a math teacher."
According to the actuarial tables I am coming within sight of the end of my life, so why do I feel I am just hitting my stride? On my 82nd birthday last week, I got a video of my high school gym teacher Stan Nelson wishing me a happy birthday. Stan is 103, almost 104. Stan was a landing officer on an LST at Omaha Beach that horrible day in 1944 when young men did their part to save European civilization, and here he is, smiling, speaking clearly, greeting one of his worst pupils. What a beautiful world we live in.
Our country, sweet land of . . . possibility.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 38% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.