The Zoom life, my gig driving Juber, and moonlighting as a construction manager and short order cook have left little room for creative writing. A few weeks into my new job I realized if I didn’t block my calendar, I’d never get to eat.
That said, my lunchtimes are too quiet. I’ve always called James at lunchtime. Every day. Or, over the last handful of years, gotten to eat lunch with him. I always appreciated that midday check-in and knew how precious it was. This is a friendly public service announcement to take this midday moment, every day, with your significant other. Soak it up. Call them to ask how their day is going. Or eat your lunch together at the kitchen table. A lifetime of lunch chats and yet what I wouldn’t give for just one more.
So this week I was driving along the interstate of San Luis Obispo that we call Broad. When we first moved here, everybody referred to everything as “off Broad.” I’m driving along when I pass San Luis Kitchen and am hit with a memory.
Just after we’d moved to SLO, James and I were out and about looking for lunch. “Why don’t we try that place near Black Horse Coffee?”
“Off Broad?”
“Of course.”
We park the car and head for the glass front door. I swing it open and am instantly greeted by a middle-aged blond woman. I immediately realize we’ve made a mistake. We’re surrounded by show kitchen vignettes. The place is empty. The blond lady is working the floor. This isn’t a lunch place, it’s a kitchen showroom.
Do we turn around and bolt back to the car? Of course not. We pretend this is exactly what we had in mind. As luck would have it, I find myself in the market for a new kitchen almost every other year of my life. It’s a thing. So I immediately kick into Kitchen Cabinetry Me. A half hour later we escape amidst conspiratorial giggles… a cabinetry quote on its way to my inbox.
I don’t even know where we ended up for lunch that day. But my guess is somewhere off Broad.