The Great Good Place

Caramba Cafe is closed again.  We got the news via Facebook on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I can't remember which.  We went there last Friday night and again on Tuesday.  We tried to make it there early both evenings because we expected them to be busy.  On Friday night, when I took the picture above, they weren't so busy yet, but on Tuesday night we got the last table that was available; there were several multifamily groups there already and they kept coming - all of us wanting one last dinner at Caramba.

Caramba Cafe used to be in Morningside, where Timone's now is, and we used to walk there.  They closed in 2010, and when they reopened on Decatur Street, some of the Morningside regular customers became regulars there.  There were people we saw there almost every time we went.  We saw our neighbor Marian there frequently, and Caroline's reading teacher from early elementary school and his wife seemed to be there all the time.  I've taken out of town colleagues there for dinner and margaritas, and we've had dinner there before being dropped off at Irwin Street for the last two lantern parades on the Beltline (this one and this one).  We continued to celebrate birthdays and report cards and the girls coming home from college there.  I celebrated the last couple of my birthdays with shots of tequila with Mia.  We took our German exchange student there several times during the six weeks or so that he was at our house; he discovered that he really liked fajitas.  There were kids there Iain's age who he'd gone to elementary school with, and the two of them would wander off to talk to other high school kids who were there.  Sometimes we sat at the bar and talked to people we didn't know, but more often we were at a table by the window.  We watched one of the protest marches following Michael Brown's death from that window; the kids took off to watch, and I stayed long enough to pay the bill.  There almost always were hugs before we left from George and Rachel and Mia.

A couple of years ago I started reading a book that I never finished, The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg.  (This was one of those books that would have been a great article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but there wasn't quite enough for a whole book).  The idea is that the public places that you and your neighbors go to regularly, whether it's a neighborhood tavern or a diner or a coffee shop or a barber shop, are important to neighborhoods and communities.  They are places you can go where they know you, and they facilitate strangers becoming acquaintances and acquaintances becoming friends.  It's a safe environment for sociability in a society where many people live alone or are far away from family and may not know their neighbors.

Back when I was reading this book, the example from my own experience that kept coming to mind was Caramba Cafe.  This was our family's great good place, and we are going to miss it very much.  If there's a great good place in your life, go there often and take your friends.  Appreciate it with your presence and your patronage.  

The last night we went to Caramba - the next to the last night they were open - I went through the piles of books next to my bed, looking for this one.  I was going to give it to Mia, but couldn't find it. 

Best of luck to la familia Caramba, and to all of us who felt at home there.