“Table for one?” the waitress asked me with a touch of “poor dear” in her voice. She couldn’t imagine that I was excited about it.
“Maybe you’d be happier at the counter, hon?” she said, folding a sentence into a question by the tone of her voice
“I’ve done counters. It’s time for a table,” I replied cheerfully.
It was during my early days of moving to New York after college, and I was job hunting. Hesitantly, she seated me at a table where I spread out my New York Times classified section and ordered a bagel and a cup of hot water for the tea bag in my purse.
Back home in Virginia, I had gotten used to ordering the 99-cent special at the counter at Woolworth’s five-and-dime that was near my summer job at a real estate agency. Eating alone at a restaurant table was a first of many firsts for me, including realizing that 99-cent meals that included hot tea were now a thing of the past. Yet here I was “adulting,” as it is now called, at a table for one, and I was surprisingly comfortable.
The big bargain of that breakfast was the experience. I became at ease eating at a restaurant on my own. It was a lack of funds, not nerve, that kept me from doing it more often. I was surprised to discover that many of the women at the publishing company where I worked shared the same poor-dear attitude as the waitress who had seated me.
“Oh no, you had to eat alone,” one of my friends moaned when I returned from lunch one day.
But it was more than that. I liked the comfort of choices. To eat alone, dance alone, or daydream alone … or with others. Both were good.
I had started taking a notebook with me when I dined alone and found it to be a good writing time. One summer many years later, I wrote a book of poetry at the outdoor garden of a Pasadena restaurant.
As research for this column, I went out to lunch by myself, something I hadn’t done in a long time. I took my notebook and sat at a table for one. And I was happy to learn that I still liked the company.
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