I seriously cannot remember the last time I went all out on a meal, but what I can tell you as a professional cook is that the amount of money that you spend is never the important part- it’s who you allow at your table. You will remember the conversation much more than you’ll ever attribute the success of an outing to the food or the wine.
I prefer to dine with one or two people at a time, because my auditory processing lag doesn’t really allow me to enjoy multiple people talking at once. Three is about the maximum number of people you can have at a table before two conversations emerge at once. I am not stingy- the more the merrier. All I am saying is that my personal preference is small and intimate. Everything is not always up to me.
I can think of two such outings.
The first was after my colonoscopy, I wasn’t feeling as out of it as the doctors promised. I was able to go out to dinner with my sister. We stuffed ourselves on appetizers and seafood at The Chart House, talking about anything and everything. What is always interesting about talking to my sister is that she’s so much younger than me that we remember the same events from wildly different perspectives. Neither is wrong or right, it’s just that a six-year-old’s memories are going to be different than an almost 12-year-old’s, for instance.
The second was my first outing with Josh. We went to the National Aquarium, where I had chicken tenders and he had a hamburger. It wasn’t fancy food that drew me, but a fascinating conversation that went from the national news to how we processed emotions… the kind of conversation that twists your brain and leaves you hungering for more. Josh used to be a journalist, and now he’s a therapist. Therefore, he asks you interesting questions as well as providing a lot of color commentary on the whole world. I have a feeling we will still be talking well into our eighties at this rate, because neither of us have a pull stop when it comes to caring about world events.
The Chart House is much more fancy than the cafe at the National Aquarium. Just because the food was “better” doesn’t mean that I had more fun. It was the quality of the conversation that made each experience unique.
The funniest outing will be introducing Josh to my sister, because they are both ADHD and I might not get a word in edgewise. 😉
Stories That Are All True 