Finding Happiness

I found happiness yesterday. It was right where I left it. Tucked away on a tiny corner, of a busy intersection, inside a little old worn-out building that I used to visit with my grandfather, Big Dad, to get lunch. Foley & Son’s Fish and Chips.

It had been a long time since I last stopped in. So long, in fact, that my once vivid memories of trips there had been distilled down to a few vague snapshots kept filed away deep in the recesses of my mind. Every now and then a story told by a relative, or a glimpse of the sign in the rearview mirror as I drove past, stirred up enough dregs to float a few memories back to the surface. Each time with a little less clarity and a little less detail than the time before.

I’m a believer that there is always a place we are meant to be and a time we are meant to be there. For the vast majority of life, we exist in one, and not the other. Sometimes we exist in neither. But occasionally, in the aimless wanderings of our places and times, the two intersect.

Eating at Foley & Son’s requires that kind of serendipity. They open one day per week, Friday, from 10:30am to 8:00pm. Take-out only. Cash only. On this particularly cold, gray, and rainy Friday afternoon (perfect for fish and chips) a work meeting put me on a drive home in the exact timeframe that they were open. Right place. Right time. I parked in the only open spot, walked underneath their faded sign, and pulled open the door.

There’s a way nostalgia feels that I find difficult to put into words. The closest I can come is to imagine that rush of air when archaeologists open a pharaoh’s tomb for the first time in the movies. A wave of forgotten memories flooding over you in a desperate scramble to fill their old vacated spaces in your mind. In the few steps it took for me to get from the front door to the counter, I traveled back two decades. Straight to my last visit with Big Dad, before he passed away.

Everything was the same. Same tile floors. Same drop ceiling. Same fryers. Same menu-board. Same menu. Same ancient Coca-Cola floor cooler that I used to lean over the edge of, with my legs dangling off the ground, just to reach the coldest cans at the bottom. I even recognized the woman behind the counter, who reminded me that her name was Patti and she had been there every Friday since she took the restaurant over from her mother in 1996. I had stepped, quite literally, into a time capsule. For the 15 minutes it took to order and receive my food I was 10 years old again, grabbing lunch with Big Dad.

Now, a day later, I’m back to 32. The memories of yesterday still fresh, but already softening. The ebb tide of memories going back out to sea. There’s guilt that comes with remembering things about people we love, a shame from having forgotten those things about them in the first place. I started writing this as an attempt to avoid that feeling. To preserve this memory of my grandfather in writing before I forgot it…again. But that has now turned into the realization, for me at least, that it’s ok to forget. Not every memory or feeling of someone or something can be preserved and carried forever. Some memories are better left where you made them, waiting for you to return. Whenever that may be.

Or maybe I should just eat fish and chips more often. Idk.