For those not in the know, it's the fourth night of Hanukkah. The fourth night focus is on dining--maybe not so much the act of eating, but the whole production of setting a table--making things pretty, sharing food. I don't profess to be the expert here, but that's the general idea.
Totally appropriate tonight because the holidays always make me think of people I've lost touch with. And lately I've been thinking of a dinner companion that fell off the face of the earth.
He was always sort of around on the outskirts of my circle of friends. Everybody knew him, but no one really knew him. He was serious-faced, an introvert. My friends and I called him Suicide Watch. I'd barely even had a conversation with him, and then one night at a Nascar race of all places (don't ask) the guys I was with got too drunk to drive me home. So Suicide Watch offered, and it was either risk being choke-fucked to death in a semi-stranger's SUV or spend the night in an RV at a Nascar race. I took the ride. A few days or so later he asked me to lunch, and over a hummus plate I told him about his official moniker. And from then on that's what we did. We ate together.
Every couple of weeks he would get in touch and we would have dinner. Every time a new restaurant opened, or some old school cocktail started trending we would be there. Sometimes he paid, sometimes I did, sometimes we split the check. And sometimes we drank cheap wine and ate frozen pizza at my place. We never really talked about anything important-no thoughts or feelings. We didn't share things about our past, we didn't talk about the future. We usually talked about the here and now, what was on the news that very day, what was happening at his office. We made fun of the people around us. I'm not even sure what kind of music he liked. From the outside it would seem like we didn't have much in common. He was quiet and serious, and I am...not. He was athletic, a cyclist, a rock climber. I am...drunk most of the time.
But he was good to me. He accommodated my vegetarianism. He called me to make dinner plans once after I'd only been home a few days after surgery. I told him I had been sick and wasn't presentable or up for solid food. Instead of taking a rain check, he came over anyway with soup and watched black and white movies. He pretended not to notice when, after living out of state for a while, that I'd come home 40 pounds heavier than when I left. We kept eating anyway. In fact the only thing that put a stop to our dinner dates was me telling him I was getting married. He never got in touch again.
I didn't give much thought to our friendship at the time. He never tried to make any moves, never even flirted, and I never thought of our meetings as anything other than dinner. A night when I didn't have to try too hard to entertain anyone or give life-changing advice or worry about if so and so was going to show up at the bar. But I wonder now what kind of escape those dinners were for him. Was it the food and drink or the no frills company? Or maybe he was stalking someone that whole time and I was his cover. Or maybe he had an ex and he wanted it to get back to her that he was out with some tattooed brunette. Whatever it was, I miss it.
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