The Power of One

The Power of One

The middle-aged farmer smiled at me as he stepped forward to pay his check at America’s preferred diner.  He was bulky without being huge and his plaid flannel jacket had that warm Norman Rockwell feeling exuding from it.  He had dark wavy hair and a gentle smile.  He rested a large book on the counter as he proceeded with his transaction and again I wondered if I had missed destiny by 30 minutes.  I was waiting for a hostess to greet & seat me and was getting hungrier by the second.  In my purse was the magazine I was planning to read while I myself had dinner alone … the situation was common and ironic: the man had finished his dinner, I was heading toward mine.  Perhaps it would have been nice for the two of us to have dinner together – instead of reading like we were hopeless intellectuals?  But what could have bridged that gap? 

I remember sitting in a small pizza place in a village on the outskirts of the Adirondacks and an elderly gentleman looked at me and said, “a nice woman like you should not be eating alone” or something to that effect.  Because he was safely 30 years my senior, I replied:  “you are welcome to share my table if you like.”  In the long run, he was picking up a pizza to-go for his wife.  But we did have a nice chat nonetheless.  A transition to sharing dinner with a complete stranger closer to my age would be just that:  “stranger” – and potentially quite uncomfortable.  Yet I am not ready to move to the level of sitting at the bar of America’s favorite diner with all the good ole boys.  I do have some shreds of self-esteem left.  I think.

Eating by myself I do often, in fact, every single day.  And sometimes I like it because I can catch up on my reading; yet sometimes I don’t.  Recently someone said to me, “well, I don’t cook too much because it’s just me …” and I thought to myself that hearing someone else express that out loud was almost painful.  It was as if because the person wasn’t cooking for someone else, they weren’t worth feeding well.  I hate those kind of sequences!   I want to shake the person and say, “By gosh, have some self-esteem!  YOU are worth a good meal!  YOU are worth the effort!  The Good Lord made YOU by yourself, not joined to the hip with someone else!”  And lucky it is that we are like that.  I can’t imagine not eating  the variety of things I enjoy because I was stuck preparing meals for a strictly vegetarian person, or a meat-and-potatoes-only sort of guy.  I want Mexican.  I want Chinese.  I want waffles for supper.  I want a drive-thru apple pie at 10PM.  I want ice cream, well, basically all the time.  I want fresh peaches today and not tomorrow.  I want a latte at Dunkin once a week.  (some day they will invite me to be on their Board of Directors – I just know it).  I want pizza with Canadian bacon and pineapple pieces.  I want chocolate in my refrigerator at all times just in case of emergency.  These are “likes” that make me most uniquely me and to expect me to “unlike” or “unfriend” those foods would be like de-bouncing Tigger. 

Years ago, the mother of one of my dear Arizona friends announced that after her divorce she had learned to go to the movies alone.  Up to that moment, I had never considered the prospect of attending a movie alone.  Aren’t movies meant to be shared experiences?  Then again, if you just lost your number one sharing partner – or if he hated the kinds of movies you like to watch – you are up the proverbial creek in a lead canoe with no movie.  I started thinking about it.  At this point I watch movies alone at home…. well, I’ve got two spaniels jumping on me and one elderly, needy cat draping herself on me as I try to hear the dialogue on the television.  That being said, it’s not really undistracted movie-watching.  Back 30 years ago the idea of going to a movie alone was kind of profane and almost scary.  Then I started to think about myself in a different way:  if I am a fun person and enjoy going to fun things, why should I stop doing those things just because my friends don’t like watching “Shaun the Sheep” or the latest Madea movie?!  In theory, this is healthy thinking.  In practice it is still a haul to get myself to see a movie by myself.

Learning to do things by yourself, arguably, builds confidence and certainly requires some tenacity.  It also gives you choices and options that you might not otherwise have.  Think of this:  when you walk through life experiences that are negative, if you wish you had a significant other to “go to bat” for you, just talk to your friends who are couples and get a reality check.  A lot of times the other person fails and does not stick up for you the way you would have wished.  Or worse, they create a scene in a way that slams your doors shut for you because you may have handled it differently given the chance to do it yourself.  Or even more worse, they take your opposer’s side.  Yikes.

Permit me to go back to the restaurant scenario for another example of that.  At the diner the other night one thing struck me:  the waiter who was young enough to be my son was falling all over me.  If I was not alone, maybe he would have reigned-it-in a little more.  But he made me feel very prioritized once seated (even though I waited over 5 minutes to be acknowledged and seated).  He brought me extra napkins without being asked, and personally walked the newly opened can of whipped cream directly to the table and frosted the hot chocolate as if it was the most important detail of his job.  It was kind of comical.  Yet it was also excellent.  And I believe in rewarding excellence – and I said to him as I ramped his tip up to about 97% of the dinner bill:  “I am not a person of means, but you made me feel special and that was great.”  You should have seen his smile. 

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