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Predicament: Dinner at a Deserted Restaurant 4/3/2012 6:25:46 PM
It was early evening and the day was drizzly, that I was hurrying up the hill in my car that I passed a restaurant. It was at a corner, right on Belmont Ave., coated with wayward vines, although not that much and a thick slab of concrete. The windows were darkened although I could still see through it and despite the speed I am at, my mind slowed down each second. I see two people, just two, and I wondered whether they were eating or talking to each other or staring like lonesome birds not likely to pounce at each other but in silence, saying things in thought; for I did not know what they were doing. They were just there like statuettes frozen in time for as I hurry up that hill, I turn my head towards the front.
This sense of melancholy pervaded me. I remembered those many times I was happiest that now, when there was no one to hold hands with and whisper sweet nothings, it only seemed lugubrious to be alone. I remembered those happy walks on cobbled walkways, joking with my partner. We took a seat at an outdoor café watching the evening come, not speaking to each other, this time around, but in one with each other. That evening, the sky turned red before it turned dark purple when we ordered some drinks. I was young, then, several decades my junior as we watched the kids play in that big plaza with the church bells ringing and old folks walking around and around.
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She asked me one question and I know I am in trouble, for whatever I say, it would not be right. It was just that I cannot be mad at her because I love her. I tried avoiding the question but I could not. So she asked me, “If we cannot have children, would we adopt a child?” I hesitated. Again, I tried not to answer. But she was insistent. She tried coaxing me for an answer but I wouldn’t until her tears began to stream down her beautiful cheeks. So I said, “Yes.”
And then she got mad at me. I smiled which made her angrier. I didn’t know what to say or do. Nothing seemed to ameliorate her. I said, “No,” which made her the more angry, angrier than angry. And then she declared, “If we are to adopt a child, the only child we’ll adopt is Lauren (my baby niece.)” I don’t recall how I got out of it for it was decades ago, now. And like a sailing ship, sailing away from port, the minute events of the day seemed to vanish in the fog of memory. Indeed, the past was gone; those little things that gave profound memory in the earlier years had diminished to a bygone age.
It was easy to throw away hypothetical questions or idiosyncracy. How many of our past had we dispensed without thinking about it? But to me, this was a little gem among the many that I can recall; items that gave meaning to my life. We did not marry nor did we have children. How foolish am I not to marry her.
That drive up Belmont Ave., watching the two diners concluding a day was not the event of the day. Rather, it triggered this thought I had, of a day in Brussels when I was happiest; when even in the most trying of times, I remember that time with my partner arguing and ending up, of an end I cannot recall. The only thing I could remember was that argument of which I could remember her.
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