My oldest son came with me to an author event yesterday in Palatka. During the drive on the way over, he explained that he’d forgotten his homework back at home.<\/p>\n
“Okay,” I said. “Then, you’re going to have a late night.” Palatka’s about an hour and a half away, and the event ran until 7:30. His best case scenario had him starting his homework at 9pm.<\/p>\n
The event ran fine. We both had a lot of fun, showed Dragon Run<\/a>, demo’ed StoryTellers <\/a>and SiegeStones<\/a>, and even made a little money. Afterwards, as we were driving out of Palatka, my son brought up the subject of dinner.<\/p>\n “We’ll have to get something on the run,” I said. “You’ve got homework.”<\/p>\n “Da-ad! We’re, we’re out<\/em>. We can’t just do fast food.”<\/p>\n “Homework?”<\/p>\n “I got it. Don’t worry about it.”<\/p>\n “Okay,” I said. “Keep your eyes open for a cool place.”<\/p>\n Five minutes later, we spotted Angel’s Diner, which had a sign that proclaimed it to be “Florida’s Oldest Diner.”<\/p>\n Of course we pulled in. It was a classic old-school diner, long and narrow, and leaning slightly to one side. There were only a few people inside, but we bellied up to the counter.<\/p>\n My son leaned close to me, “I’ve never been in a diner, before.”<\/p>\n “Take a deep sniff,” I said.<\/p>\n He gave me his I’m-not-sure-if-you’re-kidding-or-not look, so I inhaled deeply through my nose and let the smells of hot hamburger grease and fresh onion rings and sizzling butter and old polyester fill me up.<\/p>\n As my son imitated me, I watched a smile spread across his face. “That’s delicious.”<\/p>\n “That’s a diner,” I said.<\/p>\n “What can I get for you boys?” a waitress asked.<\/p>\n We looked at her blankly, still caught up in the moment.<\/p>\n “To drink?” she said.<\/p>\n “Um,” my son grabbed the plastic menu.<\/p>\n “Say ‘milk shake'” I whispered to him.<\/p>\n “What? Oh, yeah!” He smiled at the waitress. “Milk shake, please!”<\/p>\n We spent the next hour in the diner. He ordered something called a “Black End”, which was hamburger and egg and bacon all mixed together into a patty and served with melted yellow cheese on a hamburger roll. I went with The Sampson “All the Way”, a half-pound burger with everything you can think of piled on it (except tomatoes), and a side of chili cheese fries.<\/p>\n We talked about everything from school to work to whether or not they had straws back in 1935 (which is when Angel’s opened).<\/p>\n From a dad’s perspective, it was just about the perfect meal.<\/p>\n We didn’t get home until close to ten thirty, but as soon as we did, he dove right into his homework.<\/p>\n And that made it even better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sometimes, the old ways are the best ways. Enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-D4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}