Miss Bellows Falls

    The American diner is much in style these days. The great ones are celebrated in magazines and newspapers with regularity. New restaurants emerge that try to capture the diner’s spirit and appeal, but with more seats and higher prices.

     And so it was, bathed in all of this diner romance, that I steered my family to the Miss Bellows Falls for a meal on our way back from Vermont. It is old and very small. And that is the best that can be said of it. 

     The air inside is a greasy haze. Our poor waitress misses most of her teeth.

     As we wolf down our food, as quickly as we can, in walk Keith and Carl Amidon – the twins who led my elementary school basketball team to undefeated glory, but who, by high school, had faded away from sports or anything else that seemed to matter.  

     We didn’t acknowledge each other. I don’t know if they recognized me. 

     I wished at the time, and still do, I could think of the right thing to say.