An Evening

Saturday, I met up with a couple friends for dinner.

We ate at a restaurant in the town I grew up in, more or less. I don't count the six months spent in Hawaii, or the four years spent in Greenbelt. I can barely remember any of that, but Laurel is a fixture in the back of my brain.

Laurel is going through some kind of chain-establishment revival, added since my departure are a Starbucks, California Tortilla, Coldstone Creamery, Shoppers Food Warehouse, Applebees, and a LoneStar Steakhouse. The steakhouse is where we ate.

My three younger brothers work at an Outback Steakhouse. I wondered this meal counted as an act of betrayal. Instead of boomerangs and upside down maps of the world(putting Australia in it's proper place, playing second fiddle to Antartica I suppose), there were fake steer horns and paintings of cowboys taming the wild west; or maybe the taming was already done, since there were no Indians in any of the paintings. The Maryland football game was on the flat screen TVs hanging over the bar; we briefly discussed it and it became apparent none of us had any idea or interest in how the season was going for a school we all used to go to(and should therefore care about), but it was a game on TV, what else were we going to talk about while waiting to be seated.

The food and service were adequate. I briefly speculated as to how many waiters I could trip before they realized I was doing it on purpose. The consensus we reached was three to six, depending on what they were carrying. Then we discussed the best domino strategy, since the staff often traveled in packs of two or three. Trip the lead, the middle, or the straggler? Cases were made for each.

Our waiter himself presented an interesting conundrum, at least to me: how does someone so devoid of charisma get by being a waiter? Saturday night was the closet I have ever come to being served by a robot. An instantly forgettable man. My theory is he gets by because people, not being able to remember much about him, can't remember how the service was and tip at least fifteen percent. I tipped him twenty, because I always tip twenty, and I couldn't remember how the service was. Hell, I didn't remember him taking our order; when the food came I was surprised. Who ordered this? Have we been here that long?

The girl who brought the food, however, was very memorable.