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Dining Alone
30 January 2025
These days, with Joyce marooned in a nursing home, we are dining alone. So we've picked up a trick or two we thought we'd pass along.
Dining Alone. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max back triple camera at 15.7mm, f2.8, 1/40 second and ISO 1000. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
The first thing we recommend is to cook dinner. If you have any darkroom skills left, put them to use. Time and temperature. That's the key to both the darkroom and the kitchen. But things smell better in the kitchen.
If you do it right, cooking also has the advantage that you won't have to dry your dinner before you can enjoy it. Whereas, in the darkroom, you have to wait until the film or print is no longer wet.
And, of course, you can cook with the lights on.
The other thing (there are only two) we'd suggest is to light a candle or two.
There is an old tradition of leaving a candle lit in the window for someone whose return you are awaiting. It lights their way home.
We light two. With our double vision it's more Herculean than you might think. But we keep at it until they are both burning. And then the two multiply into something like a candelabra of four.
On this particular night, we wandered over to the couch after eating but before doing the dishes. When we looked back at the table, we loved what we saw. Particularly the reflection of one of the candles in the window, symbolizing the one of the two who is away.
The sunset didn't hurt either, even if it was the last glimmer of color in the sky.
That's our advice on how to survive dining alone. Not that we highly recommend it.