A look around the house tonight I found 4 cans of Dinty Moore stew up in the cabinet that I remember putting there when I bought this place. Not the cans with the pull top thing, these are the ones you have to open the old fashioned way. Buying those cans of stew oddly enough was my way of tricking myself into thinking there would be dinners and plates and knives and glasses and stuff in my future and not the bags from fast food joints that have become my reality.
Having just come out of a torrid soulful relationship when I got this place I was sure there would be another one down the road at some point and now I had plenty of room for someone else to be here. Room for another smile when I got home, laughs at dumb tv shows watched together, and another hand to hold. This was not to be and mostly by personal choice. It didn't stop me from filling the house with nice things just in case but these things I would never in a million years have bought for myself because fancy things don't do much for me. Which room would be my office and what room would be all hers, am I going to have to re-do the master bath to make it more acceptable to another, stuff like that actually went through my head.
Fifteen years later and the plates are unmoved, silverware all arranged in the drawer, and the expensive dining room table I knew someone else would love, sits having only once had a dinner on it, is now my catch-all for my still cameras and gear ready to grab and go to a shoot I may or may not have. Looking at the "best if used by" date on the cans of that stew, it reads, July 1999 (it's now 2012...)
Dinner for one is an ironic title referencing memories I have from when my girl and I would go to Lubys and the old Colonial cafeteria style places and for whatever the reason I would zero in on someone usually an elderly person sitting at a table eating alone. As often as I could without making it obvious, I would send an employee over to their table and take their ticket and say there was an overcharge or something and they would fix it and bring it back. I don't know what they actually said, but I would have them add their lunch or dinner to my ticket and not tell them who paid. Not a huge gesture money wise but to me it was leaving them walking out the door knowing someone in that place cared about them and that they weren't in this world all alone. To this day when it's me going in a restaurant alone, it still bothers the hell out of me to see someone else especially an elderly person sitting at a table eating alone. I often wonder now if what seems like a nice gesture isn't in some way just a selfish act on my part by looking at them and seeing myself in the coming years and hoping someone will notice and care about me.
In the image of my father that I have in my head, I hope Harry never had to eat alone..
