Sometimes you just gotta laugh (at breakfast)

I was reminded the other day of a breakfast I had with friends a few years ago, an experience that has always served as a great lesson to me about how utterly draining negativity can be and how to deal with it.

I’ll call those friends Ed and Elle. We met at a quaint little restaurant here in town, where everyone is usually brimming with year-round cheer, a place that served good food and plenty of it. We sat at a table with a checkered tablecloth, by the fireplace.

I loved the place but I plead temporary insanity for making plans to meet Ed and Elle there. I should have remembered that (A) they are hard to please when it comes to restaurants, and (B) they have always preferred to meet for breakfast at another place in town.

Perhaps that’s what got us off on the wrong foot that Sunday morning. I don’t really know, but while Ed and Elle are never the most positive people in the room, they really outdid themselves on that particular day.

Elle started by complaining that we needed a bigger table because there was too much stuff on ours. She was referring to the basket with jellies and the bowl of creamers as being the “too much stuff.”

Ed wanted a seat that faced the window and he was very unhappy that none of the ones available quite put him squarely in front of the glass, which he mentioned every other time he opened his mouth. I started to get a headache.

Ed ordered scrambled eggs, which he announced he didn’t really like but so few places knew how to get over-easy eggs just right; Elle ordered a breakfast burrito. The waitress brought our water while we were waiting for the food, and both of my breakfast companions complained – loudly – that there was too much ice in it. “It just waters it down,” Elle said, and my headache accelerated.

For one brief but encouraging moment, Ed changed the subject and asked how a recent trip of mine had been. I told them it was great, relieved for what could be a conversational respite from all the complaining. I offered a couple of enthusiastic sentences about my adventure which were listened to politely, and then Elle interrupted me to announce that her coffee looked gray, and the respite was over.

The food came. Elle peeked in her burrito and said it might as well be called a Denver omelet since it had green peppers in it. I laughed out loud and told her omelets don’t come in tortilla wraps. She just frowned and groused that the onion pieces were too big and the potatoes still had the skin on, and she “hated that.”

Ed’s toast wasn’t done to his liking (too light), and then out of the blue he changed subjects again, but this time to complain about his satellite service. I thought maybe their dish failed them periodically but no, the complaint was that there were too many cartoon channels, and he “hated that.”

About then Elle was pushing the food in her burrito around, counting pieces of ham (“there are only three”) and gritching because all those skin-covered potato pieces were bunched up together. I wanted to reach over and spread them apart for her with my own fork.

Instead I laughed out loud again, and my headache started getting better. I discovered that it disappeared little by little every time one of them opened their mouths to speak ill of this, that, or the other thing and I laughed. I guess I figured if they were that determined to be miserable, then I was just going to be just as determined to enjoy their misplaced misery.

I’m not sure Ed and Elle ever figured out why I was laughing through a breakfast they thought was so awful, and while I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for them – it must be very wearing and wearying to find fault with everything – I also couldn’t let their seeing the dark and crappy side of everything take over my bright-side sort of vision.

A breakfast in a cozy place with good food and friends in attendance should be a pretty bright spot, but even though Ed and Elle’s attempt to make the meal an exercise in crankiness was a downer for me at first, I consciously chose to enjoy it anyway. Sometimes you just gotta laugh to keep things in balance.