Sunday Brunch

This weekend I enjoyed what has been hailed as one of the greatest of college traditions: the Sunday Brunch. I'm not talking about dining hall brunch, oh no... I mean the Real Deal: greasy homefries, fluffy french toast, scrumptious omelets; whatever your tune, it is so much sweeter when enjoyed in a jam-packed diner with steel counter-tops and a fry cook calling out orders in the back. We set an ambitious date for ourselves of 9:30 on Sunday morning. As the deadline rolled around, we batted our eyes dimly at the blinking alarm clock, and sent a blurry-eyed text message postponing it until 10:30. Finally, we managed to drag ourselves out of bed and made our way to greet our fellow diners. It took another half an hour to rouse them from their cozy beds; some snuggling ensued. Finally, we made it to the diner. Time: 11:15 AM. Location: O'Rourke's Diner in Middletown, CT (oh yeah, I was visiting my friend at Wesleyan by the way). There were easily 20 people in the line ahead of us, and it wasn't moving at a breakneck pace, so we squatted on the pavement outside the diner and engaged in such mature activities as telephone and tying each others shoes together. We told riddles, we held dramatic readings from a book on the history of the Connecticut River (trust a Wesleyan student to bring his homework to brunch... breaking the cardinal rule of brunch, which is that one must postpone any thought of work for its duration), and we eyed the door hungrily. Just as we were about to start complaining, the matradee brought out a platter of home-made poundcake to pass around to the waiting guests. Brilliant timing. Slowly, over the course of the next half-hour, we inched toward the door, and before we knew it we were inside!

Brunch is in its very nature a slow-moving, lethargic activity. It is both too early and too late to be eating. Your mind is stuck in sleep-in mode, so you feel like it's early, even when it's fast-approaching noon. By the time we placed our orders we were starving, but the food arrived speedily, and with plenty of panache. My friend and I both placed orders for an omelet daringly named "Omelet of my dreams." Inside it was a creamy pesto of carmelized onions, gooey provolone cheese, and drizzled over top was a thick hollandaise sauce. It came with crumbly Irish brown bread and a satisfying heap of homefries. O'Rourke's has a reputation of serving up hearty, classic brunch food, but also offering a surprisingly gourmet range of specialty dishes. Other things on the menu included the house "duck-hash," an autumn themed pumpkin-bread french toast with spiced apples and ice cream, and the Beanie Baby combo, which included 1 pancake, 1 sausage, 1 egg and 1 Beanie Baby (hopefully served separately).

Overall it was a splendid meal that ended with our stomachs happily bloated, and our minds, finally fueled, beginning to race ahead toward the mountain of work that would be the rest of our day. But the burden of that work seemed somehow lighter seeing as we had enjoyed a few hours of unhurried, unworried company amongst friends.