Alone in a restaurant.

I stayed in the city for a few days and I had a great time. I met a new friend for lunch  on the waterfront on a wintry February day. Two women together talking and catching up is what we expect to see in a restaurant. A lunch date. The sea and everything around us was grey and the wind was howling. After lunch we walked through a snow storm. Sometimes it was so windy and we were walking so fast I could not tell which street I was on.

I spent the days mostly alone wandering the city. It is just a few hours away but I know hardly anyone there so I felt quite solitary most of the time. On another day I walked into a restaurant alone and there were two waiters talking to a young pretty woman. Suddenly I knew what it was it to be a sixty year old woman. One of the waiters never looked at me first nor last. The other gathered his thoughts, pulled himself away from the intrigue and waited on me. He was lovely and gave me great, kind service.

I sat alone in that restaurant and ate a Caesar salad perfectly seasoned with a little anchovy. I was not only alone at my table but the restaurant was empty at three in the afternoon. I was not lonely, yet I felt the solitude. I am used to being on my own. I sit alone with myself and my rug day after day. I am comfortable in my own skin most of the time and I love the feeling of being by myself and free to wander. 

That day though, I really took note of the fact that I had been totally ignored for a moment when I walked in. And I began thinking of other times this has happened and I began thinking about what so many older women talk about ....invisibility.

I ate my salad slowly and peacefully. I read the menu and looked closely at the decor, the chandeliers, the chairs, the pictures on the wall and I felt that though I was there I was somehow outside it all. And even with these thoughts that as I write them, seem a bit sad, I was not sad at all. I was happy and content. The water tasted pure and cold. The salad was delicious. The greyness outside my window was not my mood. I was interested in my own thoughts and my surroundings. I was happy being myself, alone with a salad, in an empty restaurant.

This being alone in the city where life to me seems more anonymous and transactional was only temporary for me. I know if I lived there full time I would shop and eat at the same places and I would get to know people and have a neighbourhood and life would be as full as I wanted it to be. But I was transient. I was passing through. I was a traveller though I was not far from home. I did not belong.

And belonging, one of the main themes of my art and my writing has always been important to me, though that day I did not need it. In fact , what I needed was to be outside of belonging. I needed to observe. Sometimes when we are in the midst of belonging we cannot see ourselves as clearly. We are so lucky to be surrounded by love and community and acceptance that we have no idea what it is to step outside of that. And for me that day It was good to be somewhere else and to see how life might be for me if my luck, my circumstances or my choices were different. It was good to observe myself outside the comfort of my daily life. I understand this is why some people love to travel, love to move about. They love the freedom that comes with it. I respect that. 

And I also respect myself and what I love which is to come home, to be home, to be surrounded by books I have read, furniture I have chosen, papers I have written on, plates I have fed family off of. I love that I seem to know where I belong and that I don't need much to make me happy. I love that home ignites my spirit, that home fires up my art, and that belonging is an important part of my story. I love that after years of feeling that somehow this was not enough, I now feel as if this is more that enough and that I am lucky to feel such grace. That not needing constant stimulation and being able to find love and beauty and joy in the everyday is grace itself. And there are days when I am still challenged by this and think I could be more, but as I grow they are fewer and further between. I question myself less because I know myself more. Self acceptance comes at a price, perhaps it is the price of the invisibility that I hear women talk about and sometimes experience myself. But I will take acceptance because it is the thing that I see in people that makes them kind and lovely. It is the thing that I want to carry with me into a crowded room or an empty restaurant.