ONCE UPON A DINER

Impressive how the Internet can send one off on so many time-consuming trips; at my age, they are most often down the proverbial Memory Lane.

Today Newsday emailed me that “LI’s oldest diner closes, another victim of COVID—-The spot has served its last order of eggs over easy with rye toast and well-done home fries” https://www.newsday.com/lifestyle/restaurants/sunnys-riverhead-diner-grill-1.50368840?utm_term=sub&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Sunday%20Top%20Reads

I grew up on Long Island and have had more than my share of eggs over, rye toast and well-done home fries. I made it out to Riverhead only once and missed out on Sunny’s Riverhead Diner & Grill. Opened in 1932, it went through a few ownership changes, before this last group bought it and the land below in 2017. I feel for those folks, the owners, the employees and the regulars like the Riverhead woman in the article who explained why she became a regular. “They see me walk in and they pour my coffee. Look, I can make breakfast at home — I’m a pretty good cook. But I like connecting with my community, and that’s why I go to Sunny’s. Every town needs a diner."

She is so right. Every town needs a diner. I may have had a slightly different take on being a regular many years ago—http://www.themonarchreview.org/irregular-peter-brav/—-but the point isn’t how regular or irregular you are, it’s community and we began losing it long before this pandemic we will survive. Every town needs a diner, maybe two or three. A diner is community, sometimes 24-hour community for the starving and one with a single cup of coffee, the gregarious and the lonely, the sleepy and the insomniacs.

I remember the Sherwood Diner on Rockaway Turnpike where I grew up. It’s still there thankfully just as it was for my parents one night a week, my father every Sunday morning with his one true friend Lenny and for me at one in the morning after another night of doing what young people do in the preceding three or four hours. Eggs are more reliable than most things in life.

I remember the Rosebud Diner in downtown Ithaca. It’s closed now but it was just 77 cents in ‘77 for two eggs, toast, home fries, and coffee. We were there every Friday and Saturday night because Ithaca had a regrettable curfew for bars. We were young, not that tired and hungry. I ordered the same thing every night, dry toast, no butter, and usually had the same waitress who always heard rye toast, buttered. It didn’t matter, I simply got used to rye toast. And I remember Hal’s Deli downtown too. Yes, not technically a diner, but it had that same feel. I remember owner Sandy greeting us as if she were everyone’s mother. She is much more memorable for me than most of my professors. Motherly, with great sandwiches in 1977, and still going strong until 2017. You can’t teach that. https://www.14850.com/05233837-hals-closing-photos/

And I remember that diner at the northeast corner of First Avenue and 79th Street too. I went there most mornings in the early ‘80s on my way to the Lexington Avenue subway. Every single time I went in, I saw the same quite elderly two ladies at the first table to the right. There was never anything on that table but bottomless cups of coffee and an ashtray full of their chain-smoking remains. On one occasion, the owner lamented to me at the register that “those two are in their nineties, all they do is smoke cigarettes and drink coffee all morning long and they’re going to live forever.” He had a gleam in his eye and I knew then that he would have been crushed if they weren’t around to occupy that table. I’m sure if I walk in there this morning, they will still be there, sipping away, smoking without knowledge of laws that may have changed in the interim, in my mind’s eye anyway. Community’s like that.

Read this in MORTAL MAG—-https://mortalmag.com/2021/10/27/once-upon-a-diner/