Had an amazing experience last night.
We have these friends who, when they travel abroad (which is about 2-3 times a year) we willingly take their children in for whatever length of time they are gone. They're good kids; it's no big deal for us (four kids, seven kids, ten kids -- what's the difference?). But each time these friends return home, they like to do "something special" for us. Some years, it's been a play. Once, it was to take our kids so my husband could surprise me with a three day get-away to Florida.
This time, it was a visit to a historic old inn about 30 minutes from where each of us live. The Holly Hotel (Holly, MI) was constructed in 1870 -- only five years after the town was founded. It sits by the railway, and originally serviced travelers steaming their way across Michigan. For years it was an inn. Rumor has it that it occasionally served as a brothel. In the early '70s (that's 1970's, now) the interior burned and the place set empty -- a forgotten shell of architectural beauty.
That's when this guy named Chuck stepped in.
He bought the hotel and transformed it into this beautiful restaurant. Serving a wide variety of amazing dishes, last year the place won 6 major award categories from "The Oakland Press". Anyway, our friends began frequenting the place earlier this summer, and wanted us to experience it with them.
The Hotel is a tribute to times past. We ordered the "Chef's Special," which is an 8 course, 3 1/2 hour proposition of dining adventure and de-stressing experience. We were waited on by a young man named "Joe" who was perhaps the most talented wait staff I have ever experienced. He was a beautiful, baratoned gentleman who read customer cues so subtle I almost thought he was reading our minds. This was Joe's last Saturday night at the Hotel; he is headed to Las Vegas to seek out the next chapter of his adventure. But what a special time for us to meet and get to know him.
See, when you take 3 1/2 hours to eat a meal, "getting to know" your waiter isn't a cliche -- it's true. The food was good; the service impeccable. The atmosphere cozy and the live music a treat. But what made this dinner something I will never forget was the ability to sit at a table with two very dear friends and simply "experience" life together over a meal in a way that no one -- no one -- does any more on a regular basis.
There is an unforgiving "thing" in our lives that is so far gone, we forget we ever had it. This thing (there are probably more, but this blog is about THIS thing) is the ability to just "be." I know, we tend to relax in different ways. For most of us, relaxing means not cooking and eating over-processed "easy" food. Or watching a DVD that lets our minds simply not think for a while. Or maybe doing something active -- golfing, swimming, etc. And it's not that those things aren't relaxing and rejuvenate, too.
But sitting over a good meal, crafted for you just like you were royalty...Not even thinking about what time it was getting to be (a first for me ... I didn't ask the time once last night, and I never thought once about the "next thing on the agenda."). Bantering with a waiter like he was an old friend and leaving hoping you would "run into him" again some day. Looking at the faces of two people we met over 11 years ago and realizing these were "lifers" (people we will know until we die).
I can't even describe the "feelings" I was having last night. Again, it brought me back to G-d's desire for us to be intimately connected into relationship -- with Him, yes, but also with each other. It reminded me AGAIN that I am not to be simply surviving life ... I should be living it every moment, every day. I waste so very much of what I've been given. A "life glutton," I spend most of my time thinking how I will spend the next allotment of time ... Eating it up by consuming "junk" that is urgent ... But not truly living at all.
I went to another viewing of a friend's who died this last week. It is the second for me in so many weeks. And I questioned myself, driving home, "When I know how short it all is, why do I still just stumble through it?"
What keeps me from truly living? Lingering over good food, joking with good people, acting on the spontaneous joys that take just a life to a life worth living?
Dearest Father, make me a person who savors life. Don't let me just continue to talk about it. Don't let me reduce it to just spurts of "being a good person" who does stuff for people, and then spends most of my life sitting back and letting my life drift meaninglessly by. I don't want to be a "canoe," that goes with the flow; I want to be a "kayak" that can cut across the current of indifference, and not be afraid to just "be" with people -- no agenda, no time constraints, no peace.
May dinner with Mary, David, Bruce and Joe remind me of what life can be. "Dining," not just eating ...