When I was in my early twenties, eating alone in a restaurant was fraught with anxiety. Walking in by yourself, being led to a table, sitting down across from an empty chair — you might as well wear a sandwich board that reads Nobody wanted to have dinner with me.
Whenever I did, I always brought a book, thinking it made me look intellectual and self-sufficient, when in fact a young person eating alone with a book looks even more pathetic than a young person eating alone without one. The book says: I have thought about this in advance, and I have brought a prop.
Somewhere along the way, though — probably around 40, which is about the time people start realizing that nobody is paying any attention to them, that we’re all too wrapped up in our own psychological dramas to notice the guy eating alone — I learned to really love the experience of dining out by myself. A quiet meal at the bar of a good restaurant, a glass of wine, something to read — this went from being my saddest experience to one of my favorite things.
And then it got complicated again.
I am now a student at the Princeton Theological Seminary, working toward a Master of Divinity degree. And one of the books that comes with the territory is the Bible — for exegesis work, for historical criticism, for textual analysis, there’s a lot of Bible reading involved — which means that I am sometimes a guy sitting alone at the bar having a nice meal and reading the Bible. Which unnerves some of my fellow diners.
I want to be very clear about something. I am not reading the Bible devotionally. I am not sitting at a bar, reading the Bible, and whispering to myself, or closing my eyes and swaying, or placing my hand on the bartender and saying, “Brother, have you heard the Good News?” I am just doing my homework.
But what other people see is a middle-aged man, alone at a bar, reading the Bible. And there are certain places where you don’t expect to see a person reading the Bible, and a bar in a nice restaurant is very near the top of that list. A laundromat, yes. A hospital waiting room, absolutely. An airport gate, perhaps. But not the bar at the kind of place that has day boat scallops and natural wines and a bartender who wants to tell you about the farm-to-table specials.
The person on the next stool glances over, clocks the Bible, and immediately shifts slightly away, the way you do on the subway when the person next to you starts talking to someone who isn’t there. The bartender becomes excessively polite, the way people are when they think you might be a little bit unhinged. I can see it in their faces: Is this guy OK? Is he about to start testifying? Should I tell the manager?
What I want to say to all of them is: relax. I’m just a seminary student trying to sort out whether Genesis 12 is from the “P” source or the “J” source because that’s what we’re talking about in class tomorrow. But of course, I can’t say that because explaining that you’re studying the Bible academically sounds even weirder than just reading it. Oh, I’m not religious, I’m just — well, I am religious, actually, but that’s not why I’m — look, it’s a textbook, basically. It’s like if you saw someone reading a chemistry book. It’s the same thing. It is not, obviously, the same thing. Nobody gives you a look when you’re reading a chemistry book at a bar. Nobody slowly moves their drink further away.
In other words, it took me until I was nearly 40 to learn how not to be self-conscious eating alone, and now I’m right back where I started. The only difference is that back then, I was embarrassed because I was alone. Now I’m embarrassed because I’m alone with God.
Or at least with His compiled and annotated works.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
