It’s a Tuesday night in a Silver Diner, the inside of which looks like a modernized 50s diner. The lights are dim and warm as two of my oldest friends and I sit in a red cushioned booth, chattering away without taking a breath. Crumpled straw wrappers, a bottle of maple syrup, and empty milkshake glasses clutter the table. The condensation of the cups has turned into little puddles because we’ve been sitting there for way too long, trying to debrief multiple months’ worth of our lives to each other. We lose track of time and before we know it, they turn up the brightness of the lights to let the late night stragglers — us, a guy drinking coffee at the bar, a group of high schoolers having a post-theater performance dinner — know they’re an hour away from close.
Going to Silver Diner when home on college breaks was a tradition I started with two girlfriends I’ve known for almost my whole life back before freshman year began. We said our goodbyes over milkshakes as we headed off to three different colleges across the state. When Thanksgiving break rolled around, we thought it’d be funny to go back to Silver Diner and then it just became the thing to do when home on break. Over the course of the last four years, we’ve hit the restaurant 17 times. We’ve been going for so long that a new Popeyes location has been proposed, approved, built, and opened behind the Silver Diner. And now we’re graduating college.
Maintaining friendships with home friends while at college can be tough. You’re trying to juggle assignments and exams and figuring out what to do in the summer or after grad while also enjoying yourself by participating in extracurriculars and hanging out with friends. Between all of those things, the people you don’t go to school with can slip between the cracks. Because when you’re living in the moment (which is so important!), you aren’t texting or calling.
It was a weird thing for me, to be so out of touch with people I cared so much about. I wanted to hear about all their successes, the classes they loved or hated, and the adventures they were going on when I wasn’t there. Our break trips to Silver Diner became the solution to my problem. Every few months, we all show up to the restaurant on a dead weeknight and proceed to cement ourselves to the booth cushions for six hours and discuss everything that’s happened since the last Silver Diner trip. The dramas we’ve encountered, the horrific classes we’ve conquered, the TV shows/movies/books we’ve enjoyed. We gossip, we complain, and we delight in each other’s triumphs and experiences. We reminisce about the past if there’s time. There’s an inevitable moment of introspection too — how are we freshman, sophomores, juniors, seniors in college? Where did the time go?
Silver Diner is something I always have to look forward to, because it’s more than a unique ambiance and absolutely banging milkshakes (I always get the nutella banana, they always get the campfire milkshake, and we would recommend either). It’s become an anchor for my friendship with these two girls. In the red booth, time stands still and the gaps created by distance are closed instantly. The last trip to the restaurant was yesterday and the next trip is tomorrow. We’re creating memories of our own while talking about what we’ve been up to but also people-watching the other diners in the restaurant and laughing at the eclectic music choices and wondering why (almost) every single time we’re there, we see an emergency vehicle zoom by. We have photos from every visit to Silver Diner. Its meatloaf contributed to one of my friends discovering she had Celiac’s disease. It’s where we had our whole meal paid for by an elderly couple who told us they loved listening to our laughter and enthusiastic conversation.
They say home is where the heart is, but for us, it’s more like home is where the Silver Diner is. We’ve used this restaurant and its food as a way to stay connected and continue our friendship despite the physical distances in between us. Things are always changing and moving in our lives, but Silver Diner — AKA our friendship — is a constant. It’s a little silly how this one restaurant has become such a meaningful pillar of our friendship but it has and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Food and place really do bring people together. I don’t know if fancy milkshakes know they have the power to bridge gaps, but they do.
And now, the proverbial lights are brightening as we finish undergrad. We’re going three separate ways again, but we’ll always have a place to come back to. People to come back to. Because our trips to Silver Diner aren’t really about Silver Diner. They’re about us coming together and picking up where we left off like no time has passed. Milkshakes might come to an end, but friendships don’t have to.