let’s do lunch
The fourth Tuesday of the month, 12:30, the Mediterranean place with Steve. Every third Thursday, the bagel place, Jock, 11:45. Friday, once a month with Silvia, the diner, 12:15. Next week, Michele, because it’s been months, at the café; Lew once again at the fast-casual place by the mall; Bob as usual at the Asian fusion place on the boulevard.
My social life revolves around doing lunch. In fact, my entire schedule in retirement revolves around lunch, the indispensable meal.
It’s the focal point of my week and my days, the event I look forward to, the fulcrum around which all the rest of my scheduling, such as it is, depends. Lunch is what gets me out of the house, gives me a chance to engage, and provides necessary variety. It’s a routine that’s a break from routine.
Most of all, regular lunches with friends provide structure.
For decades, work offered that structure, day after day filled with colleagues, meetings, small talk, shared complaints. When all that disappears, all the unstructured days can blur. A regularly scheduled lunch date (“Tuesdays at noon!”) re-creates that sense of scaffolding.
A regular lunch becomes a week’s new anchor — something to remember and look forward to and organize around. Once I’m going out to lunch, then maybe I’ll do some errands on the way and stop at the library, or go to the gym on the way back home. It’s still early!
Lunch with friends also allows us to continue being storytellers, advisers, jokers, historians, complainers — still active participants in our world. We check in with each other, find out what we’ve all been doing, the most recent health issues, the next plans for a big trip. We commiserate about the state of the world, schmooze about something we did years ago, argue — generally peaceably — about politics or sports or the thing we saw on TV the other night.
Regular lunching requires us to remember that the friend just got back from a Caribbean trip — “How was the snorkeling?” — or is scheduled to have a medical procedure. It requires memory and attention. It’s not like scrolling aimlessly through your phone or listening casually to a podcast.
Regular lunches also create a kind of mutual support network. Can you drive the friend to the airport? Do you know any good electricians? Is there somebody who might want an old vacuum cleaner? How the hell do you make these hearing aids work?
You could, of course, schedule get-together meals at other times.
But with breakfast, you may have to get moving too early, and there are a limited number of dining options, and how often can you really eat hash browns? Plus, there’s usually a circumscribed time-frame; Eggs Benedict only being served till 11-ish.
Dinner might mean driving in the dark, something many of us have grown to dislike and almost fear. Dinner also can mean eating heavily in the evening when there’s little possibility of walking it off. And for the most part, dinner usually means with a couple, so no one-on-one time with the old friend.
Unlike dinner, whose end may connote impending wind-down time, lunch can be blessedly open-ended, no need to curtail a meal because it’s getting late and there’s still stuff to do. At lunch, if we want to schmooze more, we can definitely schmooze more.
So, are we on for next Wednesday, say 12:30?