Dinner with a Stranger

Ah. A lovely dinner.  Just the two of us.  Out on the town.  Well, that was was the plan.

The kids were doing what kids do these days when not forced to dine out with their parents.  (This is my generation's version of the "walked 10 miles to school uphill both ways" story.  /Adopting scolding parental voice/  In my day....we were lucky to ever see the inside of a restaurant.  In my day....it was a special treat to go out to dinner with your parents.  We dressed up.  Croutons?  I never saw a crouton until I was 18!  Kids these days......./end scolding parental voice/.)

The Stranger first approached our table before we even had our salads.  He felt it necessary to voice his opinion on the attire of three young women preparing to leave the bar area.  Something about "advertising."  Our reply was polite but short, in the hope that this one exchange would be both introduction and farewell.  We weren't that lucky.

He had settled in at a table adjacent to ours.  He won sympathy for being a recent widower.  Who could refuse another human being a little companionship, right?  Not only that, he mentioned that he'd served our country.  All who have served certainly deserve our thanks and respect.

His story and his views continued unsolicited, tossed over to our table, stepping on any conversation we might have wished to have between ourselves.  The war?  Illegal.  And did we know all the bad regimes the US had propped up?  Pinochet in Chile.  Marcos in the Philipines.  Why even North and South Korea wanted to make up if only the US would get out of the way.  (I believe I drew blood biting my tongue on this particular comment.)

We let every political bomb die a lonely death in the increasingly much too little air between us.

We were no longer a couple out to enjoy a meal together.  We'd been transformed into eating machines, chewing to escape the presence of the Stranger who'd joined us for dinner without an invitation.  We spoke to each other in hushed tones, you know, like a couple out together might.  Undeterred, the Stranger continued in his attempts at three way conversation.

We were at one of the few bar tables of this establishment because it's the only place in the restaurant you can smoke.  The PiC has a distaste for eating in bars. Suddenly the wisdom of this preference made a lot more sense to me.  Would the Stranger have felt so ready to join us for dinner uninvited if we'd been seated in the dining area?

Now I wonder what we might have done differently.  Sharing our meal with him robbed us of enjoying our night out.  Was it worth that price to indulge a veteran widower?  In the four tables or so there really wasn't room to escape, though moving one table further away may have sent a signal of our desire to have a private conversation.  I doubt we'll eat in another bar anytime soon, but in case a Stranger decides to join us in the future, in what way are we obligated to entertain him or her?

Maybe we suffer from too much Minnesota Nice.

If we were from New York we would have said, "Hey Grampa!  Table for two here, you see?"

If we were from Hollywood we might have sent him a drink and asked the waitress to inform him it was a private party.

If I were a southern belle I could have informed him that we didn't converse with those to whom we'd never been introduced.

When the M.A.W.B. Squad rules the world, we'll just ask the waitress to move him elsewhere to make room for our entourage.  For his own comfort, of course.

Until then, I'll be practicing my southern drawl.

Comments

[Marcus Aurelius]

Marcos a bad regime? I know plenty of Filipinos who think Marcos was a genuinely great president. Can't be any worse than it is now.

[aelfheld]

I love the way idiots toss out Marco, Pinochet, and the various other third world thugocracies we've aided and abetted in the past without ever acknowledging the fact that we had opponents that made such unsavoury alliances necessary. World War III was taking place in the shadows, and these people focus on the few cockroaches that scurried across the floor.

Sorry your night out was interrupted.

[Portia]

Is there an epidemic of this? Last time the two of us went out to dinner at a nice restaurant, the strangers, two tables over insisted on inflicting ALL of Kitty Kelley's opinions of the Bush family on us at TOP volume and with a knowing wink and a smirk and a "only rubes vote for for Bush" look.

While my husband -- urbane, sophisticated -- kept me from making one of the fifty retorts that came to mind, the strangers switched topics. Yep -- the joos. The joos who are to blame for all the evil in the world. The text switched to the Protocols...

At which point I started making sarcastic retorts, as loud as theirs, until the manager came over and asked them to shut up -- then asked us what he could do to make it up to us.

It was our anniversary. We paid a babysitter. Maybe it's an epidemic?

As for Marco and Pinochet and such -- American leftists aren't exactly insular. They just ALWAYS refused to see communism as evil and the soviet union as imperialistic. They simply couldn't understand why we were protecting people from paradise.

Grrrrr.

P.

[mozyxhclp]

hIZ0lS kuhorjytqgss, [url=http://uabrgaefkjtc.com/]uabrgaefkjtc[/url], [link=http://exfkwnnlpzur.com/]exfkwnnlpzur[/link], http://ewmfrkgaluxd.com/