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aimed slightly the wrong way,
85 but the pilot banked sharply and brought the plane in on a glidepath that would, in any other
circumstance, have had me shrieking.
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We landed with a lovely smooth squeal. I have never been so happy. My wife was waiting for me in
the car outside the airport entrance, and on the way home I told her all about my gripping adventure
in the sky. The trouble with believing that you are about to die in a crash, as opposed to actually
dying in a crash, is that it doesn't make nearly as good a story.
"You poor sweetie," my wife said soothingly, but just a little distractedly, and patted my leg. "Well,
you'll be home in a minute and there's a lovely cauliflower supreme in the oven for you."
I looked at her. "Cauliflower supreme? What the-" I cleared my throat and put on a new voice. "And
what is cauliflower supreme exactly, dear? I understood we were having steak."
"We were, but this is much healthier for you. Maggie Hig-gins gave me the recipe."
I sighed. Maggie Higgins was a health-conscious busybody whose assertive views on diet were
forever being translated into dishes like cauliflower supreme for me. She was fast becoming the
bane of my life, or at least of my stomach.
Life's a funny thing, isn't it? One minute you're praying to be allowed to live, vowing to face any
hardship without complaint, and the next you are mentally banging your head on the dashboard and
thinking: "I wanted steak, I wanted steak, I wanted steak."
"Did I tell you, by the way," my wife went on, "that Maggie fell asleep with hair coloring on the
other day and her hair turned bright green?"
"Really?" I said, perking up a little. This was good news indeed. "Bright green, you say?"
"Well, everyone told her it was lemony, but really, you know, it looked like Astroturf."
"Amazing," I said-and it was. I mean to say, two prayers answered in one day.
IN PRAISE OF DINERS
A couple of years ago, when I was sent ahead of the rest of the family to scout out a place for us to
live, I included the town of Adams, Massachusetts, as a possibility because it had a wonderful
old-fashioned diner on Main Street.
Unfortunately, I was compelled to remove Adams from the short list when I was unable to recall a
single other virtue in the town, possibly because it didn't have any. Still, I believe I would have been
happy there.
Diners tend to take you like that.
Diners were once immensely popular, but like so much else they have become increasingly rare.
Their heyday was the years between the wars, when Prohibition shut the taverns and people needed
some place else to go for lunch. From a business point of view, diners were an appealing
proposition. They were cheap to buy and maintain and, because they were factory built, they came
virtually complete. Having acquired one, all you had to do was set it on a level piece of ground,
hook up water and electricity, and you were in business. If trade didn't materialize, you simply
loaded it onto a flatbed truck and tried your luck elsewhere.
By the late 1920s, about a score of companies were mass-producing diners, nearly all in a
streamlined art deco style known as moderne, with gleaming stainless-steel exteriors, and insides of
polished dark wood and more shiny metal.
Diner enthusiasts are a somewhat obsessive breed. They can tell you whether a particular diner is a
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1947 Kullman Blue Comet or a 1932 Worcester Semi-Streamliner. They appreciate the design
details that mark out a Ralph Musi from a Star-lite or an O'Mahoney, and will drive long distances
to visit a rare and well-
86 preserved Sterling, of which only seventy-three were made between 1935 and 1941.
The one thing they don't talk about much is food. This is because diner food is generally much the
same wherever you go-which is to say, not very good. My wife and children refuse to accompany me
to diners for this very reason. What they fail to appreciate is that going to diners is not about eating;
it's about saving a crucial part of America's heritage.
We didn't have diners in Iowa when I was growing up. They were mostly an East Coast
phenomenon, just as restaurants built in the shape of things (pigs, doughnuts, derby hats) were a West
Coast phenomenon.
The closest thing we had to a diner was a place down by the Raccoon River called Ernie's Grill.
Everything about it was squalid and greasy, including Ernie, and the food was appalling, but it did
have many of the features of a diner, notably a long counter with twirly stools, a wall of booths,
patrons who looked as if they had just come in from killing big animals in the woods, possibly with
their teeth, and a fondness for diner-style lingo. When you ordered, the waitress would call out to the
kitchen in some indecipherable code, "Two spots on a dot-easy on the Brylcreem. Dribble on the
griddle and cough twice in a bucket," or something similarly alarming and mystifying.
But Ernie's was in a square, squat, anonymous brick building, which patently lacked the streamlined
glamour of a classic diner. So when, decades later, I was sent to look for a livable community in
New
England, a diner was one of the things high on my shopping list. Alas, they are getting harder and
harder to find.
Hanover, where we eventually settled, does have a venerable eating establishment called Lou's,
which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary last year. It has the decor and superficial ambience of a
diner-booths and a long counter and an air of busyness-but it is really a restaurant. The menu features
items like quiches and quesadillas, and it prides itself on the freshness of its lettuce. The customers
are generally well-heeled and yuppie-ish. You can't imagine any of them climbing into a car with a
deer lashed to the hood.
So you may conceive of my joy when, about six months after we moved to Hanover, I was driving
one day through the nearby community of White River Junction and passed an establishment called
the Four Aces.
Impulsively, I went in and found an early postwar Worcester in nearly mint condition. It was
wonderful. Even the food was pretty good, which was disappointing, but I have learned to live with
it.
No one knows how many diners like this remain. Partly it is a problem of definition. A diner is
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