One Thing or Another Column: Heaven’s Diner

By Mark McNease

After taking a beloved neighbor out Sunday morning to a church she sometimes attends, we headed for breakfast at a diner not far from there. I was reminded, as I regularly am, how much I enjoy these icons of the American culinary tradition. I remember hanging out at Denny’s when I was a teenager (a quasi-diner if looked at from a certain angle), writing anguished confessional poetry in spiral notebooks (keep reading). The poetry’s long gone but I’ve never lost my attraction for the comfort of a good diner, and I never well.

I READ AN ARTICLE ONCE about New York City’s disappearing diner culture. The writer lamented the loss of a sense of community diners gave the city over many decades, falling victim to technological progress, ever-rising rents and changing tastes.

This was one day after ending a visit to relatives by having breakfast in a Richmond, Virginia, diner. When we walked into the place I immediately looked around at the colors inside. The exterior, in stark black and red, told me I could expect something exceptionally diner-ish. The booths were red and black, the tables yellow. The two waitresses were distinctly post-punk, with tattoos and neon hair. The crowd, as is usually the case in diners, consisted of people who knew each other from years of eating there. Only first names were necessary, if names were needed at all. And each of them—men, women and children—looked as if they’d enjoyed lives filled with grits and hash browns, without a single kale salad from cradle to grave. My kind of people.

That may sound odd coming from an older progressive man who spent years living in Los Angeles and New York before moving to the New Jersey woods, but I was forged as a Hoosier in a northern Indiana town, and there are parts of me that cannot be dislodged by having fled to California at nineteen. I don’t regret having had a solid sense of myself before I was exposed to the L.A. lifestyle. I’m happy to have had a clear identity that allowed me to try on others, discarding those that didn’t fit. Beneath it all I am an Indiana kid who loves a crowded diner and a cup of cheap coffee.

Diners have been my idea of stability and comfort ever since I was a fifteen-year-old poet sitting at a lunch counter, filling spiral notebooks with teenage angst while the waitress kept the .25 cent coffee flowing. I like going to diners in most places I visit. There’s a local one two blocks from where I’ll be once I’ve finished this column. I’ll order my favorite—two eggs, toast and turkey bacon, with tomato juice over ice.

The server will know me. The cashier will smile and tell me to sit anywhere. The cooks will be familiar as they move quickly from grill to kitchen window, slapping the bell, “Order up!” There will be lots of people at the tables, and even though I won’t recognize more than a few of them, they will feel like my friends—because a diner is one of the few places in life where it’s possible to believe we’re all in this together.