Dinner Date

Home again. Home again. Made the long slow drive west without incident. I traveled on a road I once disdained as too slow and tortuous. Highway 290. It is still fragmented by a multitude of towns and changing speed zones, but now the twists and turns are known, and the rush to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible is long since departed. This is a point I’ve made before but bears repeating.

I even stopped for the train in Giddings, through at least two maybe three lights. It is probably one of the few such intersections still left in a state where a lumbering train is free to impede the flow of its smaller, faster moving brethren on a major thoroughfare.  There was a time when the interruption would have run smack into my sense of urgency and the resulting explosion would have been uncomfortable for all involved. But that was then. Yesterday, I slipped the car into park and waited.

As I sat, and waited, I thought of other times when I refused to wait. Especially, the times at restaurants when the wait time seemed burdensome and unwarranted and I spent the time trying to find another establishment only to meet the same wait time and realized, as I did, that I could be eating now, if only I had waited. And I thought of what it must have been like for my wife to have been married to such a fool. Luckily, she persevered, and I figured out how the world worked, and we spent many a fine evening, together, waiting, and I’d give anything to have one more dinner date no matter how long the wait.