The Experiment – A 365 Day Search For Happiness

Having dinner at my friends new restaurant…

This is not a post I want to write. It makes me nervous and scared feeling, but as I write about everything else and yesterday wrote about going out last night I don’t see that it would be fair to skip last night’s misadventure.

The world can be a scary place, sigh… But let me go back to the beginning.

My very dear friends opened a charming restaurant a couple of years ago. It was a big hit, I enjoyed going there as their guest a number of times. They just opened a new one and it is absolutely beautiful, the food is superb, they will do very well. They just opened Saturday night.

It was decided, as I have a hard time going out, that while they would like to have had me there for the opening it was going to be a zoo, packed, and that wouldn’t be the optimum experience for someone for whom crowds are difficult, and, because my friend was going to have dinner with me and visit which he wouldn’t be able to do when things were hectic, we thought a Monday night would be better. I talked to him mid-afternoon yesterday and said again that while I really appreciated the invitation and looked forward to seeing the new restaurant if it would still be hectic and I would end up sitting alone all night — this had happened numerous times at the other restaurant — I would prefer to wait until later after all the hubbub about the new restaurant just opening died down. He assured me that last night would be fine. Turns out, it was not.

I got all dolled up and was nervous but excited going. I drove there with the Google Map Lady giving me directions how to get there and, as I always do, I left early because I abhor being late, ever, for anything. I’d rather sit in the parking lot for 15 minutes than be 5 minutes late. Last night, sure enough, I was about 15 minutes early. I texted my friend that I was there and should I come in or wait? He called me to say yes come on in but a food delivery had been delayed and he was in the kitchen but would be out soon.

I went in and was delighted to see the restaurant which I had seen via FaceTime and videos. It was absolutely gorgeous. I was seated at a lovely table in a very pretty room. My friend dashed out to the table and told me that “all hell was breaking loose” and for most of the rest of the night I watched him dashing in and out of the kitchen carrying trays of food to servers. Two or three times he came to the table to apologize and tell me how crazy it was. I ordered dinner which he brought to me and it was delicious, and I had a nice wine to go with it. It was lovely but I was nervous because I hadn’t expected to be alone. It’s a funny thing, I have never had problems in my life going somewhere alone, but when you expect to be spending the evening with someone and it is a new environment and then you end up alone it can be, well, it was, for me, disquieting. But it got worse.

My friend’s partner is the main one who runs the restaurant but my friend is there a lot to help and be sociable with all the many people who come in that know them both. My friend has another business. As the evening wore on he told me he had to run out to the bank but would be back. He ran out but he never came back. I kept waiting and when I finally asked the waiter when my friend would be back he went and checked and came and said, “He’s not coming back.” I was shocked. Seems he had a crisis with his business and got stuck there and couldn’t leave. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I appreciated the lovely dinner but being left like that had made me uneasy. I left and, I’m telling you, the next part of my story so horrified me I’m still having trouble getting over it today.

Pulling out of the parking lot there is a tricky situation where, in order to go back in the opposite direction from which I had come I had to pull out, go over 2 or 3 lanes (I can’t remember now) into a left-hand turn lane from which you sort of make a U-turn. That lane, I’m not sure quite how to describe this, had kind of a little concrete divider sectioning off the lane but it was so low it was like going over a little bump in the road. Apparently you weren’t supposed to go over the bump but I couldn’t quite figure out how to get into the lane. I did it wrong, and I was not but about two seconds out of the restaurant parking lot and into this lane, turning, when a police car with flashing lights was behind me. I couldn’t figure out why and pulled over.

I have to say here that the police officer could not have been nicer. He was very young looking, very kind, and, amazingly, apologetic about stopping me. He explained that I had gone over that concrete thing, that that’s why he stopped me. He asked where I had been coming from and I pointed over to the restaurant and told him that my friends had just opened their restaurant and invited me to have dinner there. Then, he asked me if I had had anything to drink. I said yes, I’d had wine with dinner. He took my license and registration and came back smiling and said everything was okay but then he said, “I’m sorry but since you said you had wine I have to do this test.” It was a little breathalizer (I’m not even sure how to spell that.). I tried. Several times. For some reason it wasn’t working right. We weren’t sure why other than the fact that because I’m paralyzed on one side still from Bell’s Palsy that might have affected it.

He was very kind, as I’ve said, and again, apologetic, but he said since the breathalizer didn’t work I would have to get out of the car. I did and I didn’t have to walk some straight line or anything, I clearly wasn’t drunk, but, having stopped me, and my having said I’d had wine with dinner, I guess this is something he had to do. He was very gentle with me and had me stand in front of the police car facing away from the headlights. All he did was have me follow a little light he held with my eyes going this way and that. It only took a minute, he apologized again for having me get out in the rain, told me everything was fine, that I wasn’t going to get a ticket or anything, but that since he’d stopped me he had to give me a warning. It wasn’t until today that I even looked at the paper. I was too nervous last night. On the paper the box that was checked said something about having stopped me because of a tail light?

I had stayed perfectly calm through the whole thing but driving home I was scared to death, incredibly upset, and I told my friend I would never go there again. One thing, he told me, is that because of all the drunk drivers now, and especially with the opening of a new restaurant/bar the police are out just waiting, they are stopping lots of people all over this town. I was barely out of the parking lot and he was right there. I was not driving drunk, I have never driven drunk, and the police officer was very kind, no ticket, but it unnerved me so badly I’m afraid to ever go out again. I go out so rarely and I like to have a glass of wine with a nice dinner. Goodness gracious just last week, as I wrote here, I stopped at a darling little neighborhood bar near my house and had a glass of wine. I never do that, and it was very lovely, and I just had my glass of wine, wrote for awhile, and went home so happy that I had done something so brave, but now I am afraid to ever go out again anywhere and have a glass of wine. It doesn’t matter that I would not be driving home drunk. If you have had any alcohol and get pulled over you could get a ticket. I don’t know how that all works but I am too terrified now to risk it. Today I feel like I don’t want to ever go out anywhere ever again. I am teary and afraid just writing this. I am so upset about last night I don’t know how I’ll ever get over it.

I talked to my daughter Rachel today. Rachel is a calm voice of reason. She is also a psychologist, knows me better than anyone, and knows that I am no alcoholic! She told me “not to go 1000% in the other direction,” meaning not to be afraid to go out simply because of what happened last night. She knows that it was huge for me to stop at the little bar near my house to have a glass of wine, a nice little outing, near my house, that it did me good to actually go someplace. But the whole thought terrifies me now.

This morning I had to be up very early to take the pugs to the vet at 7:30. We got out and I picked them up a couple of hours later and once home and settled I planted myself here at the computer and I’ve barely moved. I have been in this kind of bubble of happiness since my outing last week. I was so proud of myself to be all dressed up and out to go to my friends restaurant last night, another big adventure for me, but it all went awry, and I feel like in the last week I took a couple of tiny steps forward and have now gone a million steps back in the other direction. Today the world feels like a scary place to me, I don’t feel safe in it, and I feel desperately sad because I had begun to imagine a new kind of life for myself opening up, not that I was going to be going out to “paint the town red” but that I might start to go out here and there, I might even try to find a way to get involved in something where I might meet people. Today I am terrified to go out anywhere at all.

I don’t know how to move on from here. I have therapy tomorrow and we will talk about it. I had thought that maybe on the way home I would stop at the cute little bar and have a glass of wine. I will not be doing that. I have to go to Costco for groceries and the drugstore for medication for Pugsley and frankly, today, I don’t even know how I will manage those things. My world had begun to open up. It is closing again. And I am simply heartbroken over it.