The Man Who Sprints to Restaurants
Since those days of being the unhinged young man in the rakish pirate shirt, have I transformed, now twenty-five years later at the age of 54 with a wife and twin daughters, to a mature man who is now wise and self-possessed?
To answer this question, we need to look at my compulsion to run toward restaurants. I don’t mean to say that I casually run to restaurants after I park my car in the nearby lot. I sprint.
My wife has been complaining about this compulsion of mine since we first started dating many years ago. I’ll park the car, get out, and make a dash for the restaurant. This compulsion to sprint full-speed to an eatery is rooted in three things. One, I feel this need to be ahead of the line. Two, I’m always hungry, and I can’t wait to eat. Three, I suffer this paranoid anxiety that the restaurant will run out of the ingredients necessary to make my favorite dishes.
To help remedy this compulsion, my wife has agreed that we can go to restaurants as early as 5 P.M. before the restaurant gets crowded. But this measure hasn’t abated my compulsion to sprint to the restaurant in which I often barrel my way past a throng of pedestrians who stare at me as if I were a bat out of hell. My wife never runs with me. She shakes her head in disgust, and eventually catches up with me in the restaurant lobby before giving me a look of admonishment.
Her displeasure with me doesn’t end there. When we sit at the table with our menus, I’m always quick to determine "the greatest dish on the menu" so that I can announce my decision upon the server’s first request for our order. My wife is never done studying the menu and must always ask that the server come back in five minutes or so to give her more time to decide. This always drives me crazy because I have a fear that the server will not come back or be delayed an annoyingly long time. I have memories of servers not returning until a half hour after sending them away because people at my table weren’t ready to make their order, and these memories have convinced me that I must order my food upon the waiter’s first table visit. I also have painful memories of the server leaving the bill on the table and not returning for forty-five minutes, so I always give my credit card to the server before he has time to lower the bill to my table. This technique further reinforces my stressful approach to dining out. It’s less of a relaxing, leisurely event and more of an obstacle course inhabited by dragons that I must slay with all the weapons at my disposal. My poor wife returns from our “evenings out” in a state of utter exhaustion because, let’s face it, my generalized anxiety disorder, a diagnosis a therapist assigned to me, sucks the energy out of people.
Fatigued from going out with me, my wife will come home, have a few glasses of wine, and convalesce in front of the living room television. Peering at her sad, tired face from the hallway, I have a deep pity for her. She looks like she just survived an invasive medical procedure that didn’t go as smoothly as expected, and she’s waiting for the pain meds to kick in. In those moments, I’m tempted to come into the living room and apologize for “shitting the bed” at the restaurant, but I know from past experience that she needs distance from me, and that the best thing I can do for her in those moments is make myself disappear.
To my defense, over the years I have improved my behavior somewhat. I no longer order meals for both my wife and me, inhale all my food in a few minutes, and then hungrily take half of my wife’s entrée. You see, I have matured somewhat.
But I still sprint toward restaurants. Recently, my wife, our six-year-old twin daughters and I went to the mall to eat at The Lazy Dog Café. When we got out of the car, I suppressed my urge to sprint toward the restaurant as I held my daughter Natalie’s hand. Fifty yards ahead of us, Natalie recognized a classmate from her kindergarten class. She wanted to catch up with her classmate and say hi to her. In my gut, I knew my daughter’s classmate and her parents were going to Lazy Dog Café, and I didn’t like that they had a head-start on us. You see, they were no longer pleasant acquaintances for me to get to know better. They were competition for restaurant seating. Holding my daughter’s hand, I ran toward the family, and said to the father, “Are you going to Lazy Dog Café?” He said he was, upon which my daughter and I sprinted toward the restaurant, leaving my daughter's classmate and her parents in a cloud of dust behind us.
When my wife and my other daughter Julia caught up with Natalie and me in the restaurant lobby, my wife said, “You just embarrassed yourself. Now that family knows that you were racing to get a seat before them. You always have to have the advantage.”
My wife’s words were irrefutable. What scares me is that I didn’t even know what I was doing until after the fact. I was unhinged. I had shit the bed.
If a routine trip to the restaurant with my family becomes a crisis wrought with “danger,” is it any wonder I’m so terrified of death?
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