Closed for Remodeling (something else, not the website)

This day has been coming for a long time. There were rumors floating around last summer, but today it became real. One of the restaurants that has been a significant feature in my life is closed for remodeling. I'm not sure when it will reopen. I just know it will be different and better. And I'm not sure I'm completely okay with it.

Mind you, it was a bit of a dive. I don't think I should give the specific location, but if you happened to be in the Bearden area of Knoxville, and wanted to visit a "house" that served pancakes with an international flair, and perhaps had a hankering for a "Rooty Tooty, Fresh and Fruity", you may know the restaurant I'm talking about.

Back in the days of my youth, this was the place to gather after a late-night playing gig. My friends and I would wrap up our final set around 12:30 or 1:00 a.m. and head to this place for our late-night meal. Sometime around 2:00 a.m. Michael's Cow Palace - a nightclub filled with desperate men and the cougars who hunted them - would issue "last call" and the partiers would join us. The restaurant was filled with folks who just couldn't yet give up the day. My friends and I spent hours talking about music, comic book characters, future plans, who we wanted to date, who we had dated, and what was going right and wrong about our lives. Sometime around 4:00 a.m. guilt got the better of us and we all went home.

Fast forward 35 years or so. Some of the same friends are still here, and we still gathered at this restaurant. Things are different now. We now meet at 9:00 a.m. We can't imagine being awake at 1:30 a.m., let alone starting a new round of activity. Our conversations are different too. We still talk about music and comic book characters, but we also talk about parts of our bodies that hurt. We talk about our jobs, including some we've lost. We talk about our kids. Sadly, including some that we've lost. We all separated for several years, but some strange gravitational force brought us back together at the restaurant of our youth. And I swear to you, it hadn't changed a bit in all those years. The pictures on the walls were still the same. It smelled the same. It probably broke all sorts of health department regulations. Sometimes it's best to not know too much.

But that's not the point. The point is that it was a reliable bridge between life stages. Someplace that weathered the enormous changes that my friends and I went through. And now it will be forever different. It will be cleaner, shinier, and better, but I will miss what was. I suppose it's representative of deeper thoughts and feelings. The entire world is going through a remodeling, and I'm not sure I like all the changes. Yes, there are things that are shinier and better, and I love the convenience and ease that I enjoy now. But some things are just hard to say goodbye to, knowing that they won't be back in the same way.

Ah well. Life goes on. And I suppose the general arc of life pulls towards progress despite our natural reluctance to give up the familiar in exchange for the unknown-but-probably-way-better. I'm grateful beyond words that the guys with whom I ate way too much bad food with will still be there in the new place for a new round of memories. Buildings change. They are torn down, rebuilt, remodeled, and refreshed. Kind of like the process of aging. However, buildings don't determine friendships. Those last through all the change. Here's to more coffee, bad jokes, and conversations about music, comic book characters, and everything else that makes us more brothers than friends! I'll see you at the new place.