The Lunch Counter

A Meditation on Swivel Seats, Social Capital, and the Places Where We Belong

Earlier this summer, Heidi and I attended a wedding near Snowmass, Colorado. On our way back to Denver, we stopped for lunch at a diner in the little town of Frisco. While waiting for our meal, I glanced up and noticed a group of people lined along the counter, talking with one another, with the wait staff, and with just about every friend who wandered through the door. They were clearly regulars. They had their places. They knew the rhythms of the room. Needless to say, as a photographer, I had to pull out my camera.

There was something wonderfully comic about the scene. There they were, perched on their familiar swivel seats above a black-and-white checkered floor, looking for all the world as though they were defending Helm’s Deep against Saruman’s enormous army of Uruk-hai in Tolkien’s The Two Towers. The world was coming through the front doors of the diner, and they seemed perfectly content to let it come.

Perhaps I should have been put off by the provincial coziness of it all. I wasn’t. I have always loved out-of-the-way diners, and I recognized this little slice of Americana immediately. These people belonged to this place, and, in some small way, the place belonged to them.

We live in a culture that has taught us to admire the solitary adventurer—the person who climbs Everest without bottled oxygen, strikes out alone, needs nobody, answers to nobody. Independence has become one of our favorite virtues. And yet I suspect many of us feel a sneaking affection for the lunch-counter clan on their swivel seats. They possess something increasingly rare: a life woven together with other lives.

For an hour or two, at least, the doings of their shared little world matter more than whatever is happening elsewhere. They are not looking for the newest thing or the next thing or the better thing. They have already found what they came for: coffee, lunch, a familiar face, someone who knows their name. Maybe that shouldn’t seem quite so remarkable.

For most of human history, we lived close to one another—not only in distance, but in knowing. We shared stories, meals, sorrows, celebrations, and the familiar rhythms of ordinary life. We knew who needed tending, who could be counted on, who told the same story for the hundredth time, and whose absence at the table meant someone ought to go looking. It is strange, then, that we should imagine ourselves capable of simply outgrowing the need for such belonging.

Our post-Covid world has only complicated matters. We discovered we could work alone, shop alone, eat alone, worship alone, entertain ourselves alone. For an introvert like me, some of this came as fairly good news. But there was a cost hidden in all that glorious independence: loneliness, isolation, and the slow disappearance of the places where we simply bump into one another.

Robert D. Putnam saw something of this coming in his book Bowling Alone. His famous image is wonderfully simple. Americans had not necessarily stopped bowling. What was disappearing were the bowling leagues. People were still bowling; they just weren’t bowling together.

Putnam called what was being lost social capital—the web of relationships, trust, reciprocity, and shared life that grows when people belong to things together: churches, civic clubs, neighborhood associations, unions, PTAs, volunteer organizations, bowling leagues. Diners, perhaps.

When those networks disappear, we lose more than organizations. We slowly lose the habits that organizations once taught us: knowing our neighbors, trusting people beyond our immediate circle, cooperating with people who are different from us, showing up when someone needs help, and believing that we owe something to a world larger than ourselves.

Which brings me back to that lunch counter in Frisco. My photograph seems to diagnose an illness we are sometimes reluctant to admit we have: homesickness for a home we may not even know how to name. A yearning for a tribe of our own, a handful of people who know us, a place where we don’t have to explain ourselves every time we walk through the door.

There is, of course, a shadow side to all of this. Every circle can become a closed circle. Belonging can harden into exclusion. A community can become so pleased with itself that it forgets the stranger standing at the door. The answer to loneliness cannot simply be building higher walls around smaller tribes. But neither can the answer be pretending we no longer need tribes at all.

Maybe what I envy about those people in Frisco is not their community. I don’t particularly need a swivel stool at their counter. I want mine. I think most of us do.

And I find myself wondering about the young adult walking through an uncertain world with a tiny screen held in the palm of a hand—a device capable of connecting them instantly with almost everyone, while sometimes leaving them profoundly connected to no one.

So perhaps the larger question is not whether we need community. We already know the answer to that. The question is whether we can remember how to make it. How do we create places where people linger, where meals take longer than necessary, where someone notices when we haven’t shown up, where generations mix, where stories get told more than once, where strangers slowly become acquaintances, and acquaintances, with enough time and tenderness, become friends?

Perhaps our growing isolation is not simply a private problem requiring private solutions. Perhaps it is a tear in the social fabric itself, and repairing it will require more than another app, another self-help book, or another exhortation to take better care of ourselves. Perhaps we need to take better care of one another.

And maybe rebuilding community begins in ways so ordinary that we barely notice them: a table, a meal, a front porch, a choir, a garden, a neighborhood gathering, a volunteer crew, a coffee shop—or a row of swivel seats above a black-and-white checkered floor. Places where we can find one another again.

In an increasingly fragmented world, maybe some of what we need most is remarkably simple: a place to gather, people to know, something to share, and the quiet assurance that, somewhere, someone will notice when our chair is empty.