This has been a strange day, and I'm inclined to believe that my wife had something to do with it.
It's my 45th wedding anniversary and due to an apparent quirk in my brain I decided to drive down to Nelsonville, Ohio for a visit to the infamous (OK, that's probably my fault) Dee's Diner on U.S. 33. You see, before she died 12 years ago my wife and I would stop at Dee's a couple of times each year during Ohio's gun-hunting season for deer. As I've said here before, the food was always bad and the coffee even worse, but eating at Dee's was a sort of tradition, about which we would always laugh.
But as I said at the outset, this has been a strange day. I walked into Dee's and, as usual, tried to get into a booth from the wrong side. Each row of booths there has a long board as a brace running from the front booth to the back booth along one side. I'm sure there's no need for the brace, and it's really there so people can laugh at newcomers who tried to climb in from that side, and at repeat idiots such as myself.
But after that is when strangeness began. I ordered a double cheeseburger, cooked medium rare, with grilled chopped onions and some mustard and mayonnaise on the side. And then I added some sugar and cream to the coffee that had been delivered even before I ordered. The strangeness wasn't that the coffee was served without my asking. That's sort of standard. But somehow the coffee was good. In more than 20 years of having coffee at Dee's Diner this was the first time it was ever actually drinkable.
What happened next, though, was the real eye-opener. My double cheeseburger was delivered, and so were the sides of mustard and mayonnaise. For the very first time I did not have to remind anyone of the condiments. But that was minor. Somehow, for some reason, my double cheeseburger was cooked the way I'd ordered it -- medium rare. Not only that, but the chopped grilled onions, for the very first time in all the years, were actually chopped and not sliced.
And with all of this having occurred the most astounding thing of all was that the burger was really, really delicious.
When I got up to pay my check I asked the waitress, who doubles as the cashier, if they had a new cook and was told, no, it's the same woman who's been cooking there for the past 15 years or more.
As I climbed back into my Tucson to leave I double-checked the sign out front to make sure it was really Dee's Diner; that I hadn't somehow taken a wrong turn to a parallel universe. According to the sign it really was Dee's. I pulled out onto a busy U.S. 33 for the return trip and it occurred to me that my wife must have had the day off up there and had decided our anniversary was a good time to play with my mind.
<message edited by Michael Hoffman on Tue, 09/7/10 3:45 PM>
