About a quarter-past six on Friday mornings, the lights go on in the dining rooms of the Wayside Restaurant, straddling the boundary between Berlin and Montpelier. A waitress maneuvers three or four tables into a line on the Montpelier side, and shortly a group of diners of a certain age filters in, singly or in pairs. Their coffee — decaffeinated or regular — and tea are set in front of them as if by magic, with rarely an error.
When the tables are full, at half-past, the waitress designated for the day takes the orders — kitchen omelet and hash browns, two over easy on rye toast, Spam and eggs. When she reaches someone who never changes his order, she just nods and writes without asking. The conversation, which began as soon as two people were there, barely pauses as the orders are taken.
The table is long enough that a single conversation isn’t possible. There are instead two or three going on at once; and I often find myself wishing I could hear one that’s just out of earshot. But then I reflect on the millions of conversations that I can’t hear, and try to relax.
In recent years, any questions of fact that arise are settled by the cellphones that several members pack like old-fashioned six-shooters. The definition and derivation of “ballyhoo” or “brouhaha” can all be settled in a few moments. One week — I can’t remember or imagine why — the question arose of the highest mountain in New Brunswick. “Mount Carleton,” Siri responded. “Eight hundred seventeen metres.”
There’s almost always a woman among us at the Wayside, but groups like ours are generally called Romeos — for Retired Old Men Eating Out. They’re everywhere. If, for example, I have to take off early some morning for a TV shoot an hour or more away, I make it a point, if I have time, to stop at a McDonald’s on the way. There’s invariably a table of old guys who gather there every morning for coffee and maybe a sweet roll and local gossip. Walking politely up to them and asking if there’s room is guaranteed to shut off their conversation. But a mild insult — anybody here still working? — is equally sure to have them make room for me. It’s instant inclusion, and the company most pleasant.
Once a month, in Lyme, there’s another gathering of Romeos, quite distinct from the one at the Wayside, that I try to make, if the weather and roads and my schedule allow. Among former CIA analysts and operatives, physicians, professors, security consultant and hazardous material professional, retired bistro owner, conservationist and developers, the conversation is more elevated — the highest mountain in North Carolina, for example.
Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, describes it beautifully: “… in companions that do converse and waste the time together, whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love, there must be needs a like proportion of lineaments, of manners, and of spirit.” And so it us with us. We disagree, but with age tend to think alike — less disputatious, more inquiring — and we do look a lot alike.
The coffee shop, I think, is my favorite. It’s inexpensive — $1.75 for a small coffee, lay down two bucks and put the two bits change into the tip hopper. There are regulars there: retired teachers and nurses and businessmen, legislators active and retired, and at least one elderly fellow car guy. The sum of their knowledge is all you need to know about your local environment. I was amazed to learn one day, when I groused about a rate hike in the insurance coverage that supplements my Medicare, that every insurer in my state is required to provide the same coverage, but that the rates vary widely. A week later I was paying about $70 a month less. That covers a lot of coffee.
Modern coffee shops are the descendants of the originals in London, where they flourished from the mid-1600s to the late 1700s. Often called Penny Parliaments, because that was the price of a cup of coffee and the egalitarian discussions went on all day, they were places where the new ideas of the Enlightenment could be bandied about, extolled or excoriated. One of the most well-known coffeeshop habitués (and my favorite) was the “formidable conversationalist” Dr. Samuel “Dictionary” Johnson. Perpetually mired in penury, Johnson could for a penny or two spend days chatting, arguing and bullying. “If … his pistol misses fire,” wrote his biographer James Boswell, “he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” When he had an opposing debater on the ropes one day, he declared, “Sir, I have found you an argument; but I am not obliged to find you an understanding.” I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall of that shop.
I doubt the conversation of our usual Romeo groups approaches the gravity and depth of that of those old coffeehouse denizens. And the presence of the cellphone does impose occasional constraints. But now that I’ve got the time, there’s almost nothing else I’d rather do with my mid-mornings.
Willem Lange can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
