Love and Black Saturdays

Photo by Kelsey Chance on Unsplash

Black Saturday and the falling dusk finds me with wine glass in hand, sitting at the corner table of a tiny Spanish restaurant. I'm loving the wine (a grenache), but it is only the precursor to one of my favorite annual traditions: Black Saturday Dinner. 

About five years ago, I was trying to find the time to reconnect with a childhood friend. She was getting married, and we had agreed to meet up for one final pre-wedding dinner. We'd eat and drink and remember the adolescents we once were, and how we used to talk through the night and tell each other secrets. But we were both adults with full careers and very busy lives, and it seemed that we just couldn't make the time. And then, a few days before Holy Week, she called. "Black Saturday? Keep that night free. We're doing this." We did, and that's how the Black Saturday Dinners were born.

Black Saturday Dinner is a night I've put aside to reconnect with people I love and with whom I've lost touch. Old school friends, cousins (it's surprisingly easy to lose track of family, even when you live in the same city), former colleagues. One year, I arranged  dinner at the home of my favorite college professor. He cooked Bicol express and pasta in his cramped kitchen (does he cook!) while we, his former students, huddled around the battered wood dining table drinking beer and retelling old jokes and anecdotes. How loudly we laughed, as though we'd never heard them before. And just for one night, it felt like the years had rolled away and we were kids again with no other worries than the next term paper.

This year, I had wine and paella with two ladies I used to work with back when I was a food editor. We had shared a great many superb meals and long, intense work hours. We always had the best office lunches (I mean, it's hard to beat the lunch of a food editor, honestly), and crazy adventures both in the kitchen and out of it. In the office, we shared a center table that was so famous for its piles of edible treasures that our coworkers used to call it the Blessed Table.  

I'd missed them terribly, hence this dinner. 

We caught up over fresh baked bread and queso de cabra, and by the time they served the Galician-style paella and fresh salad, we had moved on to all the juicy industry gossip I had missed out on (not much, really, but still quite juicy). We talked about how much things have changed in media, in publishing, an industry once so glamorous and full of  promise. And of course, we tried to predict where we thought media was headed. 

We had finished the carménère and uncorked a malbec when the conversation segued into a lively discussion about storytelling. 

I am the guilty party who started it. Storytelling, I said, what with all these blogs and social media, and everything else--they've changed the way we consume stories. Does that mean that the principles of storytelling have changed, too? I mean the bones beneath the flesh of the stories--the context and the conflict, the story arcs and the characters. The ingredients that combine to produce magic.  

It was a subject none of us could resist. 

Short and simple, and visual, said B. Because social media has changed our brains so much, and now people have the attention span of fleas! At the expense of nuance, too. It's a shame.

Data, said M, it's always about the numbers now. Hits, likes, engagement. Success is measured by statistics when really, stories are all about heart. A really good story makes you feel, touches your soul. It's never just about the numbers. 

Soon we're going to want to experience stories, not just read about them or watch them onscreen, said me, who was fresh from a VR game. It's  really going to change everything.

Well, that is the gist of the evening's conversation. We finished the malbec and then a cabernet, and still the subject lingered till we were at dessert and coffee. And as we talked, I kept saying, over and over again: How I miss it all. How I miss telling stories. How I miss, I very badly miss writing about food. 

Until finally, M looked me right in the eye. 

So, she asked, what's keeping you from it? 

Uh, I stuttered, trying to think of an answer.

She smiled at me over the rim of her glass.

She's right. Nothing's keeping me from writing, an act that to me is as natural as breathing. 

I said that on Black Saturdays I dine with people I love. This year, I rediscovered something I love.

I am a storyteller, and I write about food. Welcome to my blog.