Last night, I beat a ticket.

It was a pretty big deal, at least for me. If I had lost it would have been an expensive ticket, a whole slew of points on my record, and likely a jump in my insurance that I don’t want to think about. Yeah, I tend to drive too fast.

So beating meant saving a few hundred dollars. Reason to celebrate.

On the way home, I stopped and dined at a new place called Brooklyn Marie’s for dinner. (That’s it in the picture above.).

Notice that I used the word dined. There’s a difference between eating and dining. It’s more than the difference between McDonalds and the Ritz Carleton. I have eaten at fancy restaurants, and I have dined at McDonalds.

The difference has to do with how you eat, mindfully and savoring, and with what you do as you eat. Normally, for me, dining involves conversation. Which means that a dinner can run hours.

There was a time, a decade ago, when dining alone, much less celebrating alone was something I didn’t do. I was coming off a divorce and my whole life for twenty-five years had been focused on being a couple, then a family. If there was something to celebrate, we did it together.

With a divorce, of course, that comes to an end. And that was hard to deal with. I felt incomplete dining alone. Less than whole. Conspicuous. Awkward. Dining alone caused me to focus more on my sense of loss than to savor the food and the experience.

I can recall when that changed, just as it does in any great loss. I was on my way back to Daleville, Va (my home at the time). I had just closed my first project with CNN, a design project for a large control room. I was feeling the victory, flush with energy and excitement. Driving home, I realized though, that I had no one to celebrate with.

I pulled into Strausburg, Va. Normally I’d have grabbed a burger and hit the road, hurrying home to wife and kids. But there was no need to hurry to my empty apartment under the stairs. So I drove into town.

I have memories in Strausburg. My ex-wife and I had gone antiquing there. Things from there were in our house. There was a hotel there, the Hotel Strausburg, a big old Victorian kind of place with a fine dining room. I had often thought it would be a good place for a weekend getaway. Atmosphere. Antiques. Good food. But we had never made that particular trip.

I decided to go there and have dinner. Just me. The hostess led me to a table in the back. Red velvet chairs. Antique tables. Silverware. Candles. It was like stepping back in time.

The room was half full, mostly with couples. A few tables with groups. There was laughing and intimacy and conversation all around me. I expected to feel….obvious. Like somehow everyone would know I was broken and had no one to dine with.

But of course, no one noticed. Those are things we tell ourselves, not things that are real. The dinner was slow. This was a place you dined, not a place you ate at. I had a glass of wine. I enjoyed the antiques and the atmosphere. I thought, not about the place I was in at the moment, but about times in the past, other journeys. I thought about some of the things in my new alone life that I was coming to enjoy. I thought about what a wonderful thing it was to even be able to treat myself to such a meal.

I talked to people. The waitress. The bus boy. The manager. I learned history and learned about how they fixed the veal I had ordered. The meal was delicious. I savored it. Even without conversation, it was a nearly two-hour meal.

And I learned something. That I was becoming whole again. I was not there yet. I didn’t kid myself. That would take years. But it was happening, and I could enjoy life by myself.

It’s not the same, celebrating alone. But it is a sign, when you learn how, that you are comfortable in your skin. You may love being with others (and I do.), but to be able to celebrate alone is a sign that you don’t need those others to have worth, to celebrate moments and savor the wonderful things in life.

Brooklyn Marie’s is not a fancy place, despite the elegant dining room. But the food is good. It’s comfortable. The atmosphere lends itself to quiet conversation, or in my case, quiet contemplation. I thought about the past couple of years. The loss of my parents. My son leaving his mom and his life behind to live with me. My daughter, launching out on her own. I thought about my changes in work, in the strange path to becoming a pastor. I thought about love, and the woman in my life, and my joy in her. I thought about struggles and wonderments and joys.

And I celebrated. Not so much, as it turned out, beating the ticket. I celebrated something else. The journey. The survival that has turned into something more, a comfort in the chaos perhaps. An understanding that I do not have to be whole to be happy.

I finished my meal. I toasted life and those I love with a diet coke. And I left. No one noticed me, I am sure. And that’s OK. It was a celebration none the less.

Be well. Travel wisely.

Tom