We ate dinner at a restaurant tonight. With friends.
It’s hard to describe exactly how unusual that was. And simultaneously how perfectly ordinary.
A good friend of ours has a problem that seems related to acid in her diet. She’s been adhering to a strictly neutral/alkaline diet for a few months, waiting for non-essential medical services to resume so she can get properly tested and diagnosed. Her doctor called with an opening on Monday, and to gather data she needed to eat something close to “regular meals.”
She wanted a steak & a glass of wine, and asked if we’d be up for finding a restaurant and eating with them. To my surprise Dawnise decided she was up for it.
A bit of searching this afternoon revealed that the Flat Iron and the Hawksmoor near us are still closed, and a bit more searching by our friend secured us a booking at Blacklock.
We got dressed. Dawnise did her hair and put on makeup and heels. I wore a proper shirt. And shoes. And a watch.
And we walked to meet them.
The restaurant took a bunch of seemingly reasonable steps – the doors at both ends of the large room were left open to the outside. Every other table was left empty. Our server asked about how close we were comfortable with her getting, and there were hand sanitizer stations strategically placed around the room.
The food was fine, but more important was we were out.
And there were moments, talking to good friends, eating food we neither cooked nor collected, that felt so… normal.
P.S. When we got home, the cats collected around Dawnise on the sofa, seemingly having forgotten that in the “before-time” the humans were not here as often as they were.