As an older adult, I was quite careful about going to restaurants for quite a while, concerned about getting ill. I got vaccinated for covid back in February, but I and my friends had gotten out of the habit of meeting for coffee or a meal. It’s taken most of a year to re-establish old patterns. Still, some friends are not yet comfortable meeting in a place where, in order to eat, everyone takes off masks eventually.

Fathom magazine had “Friendship” as a theme for their November issue, so I submitted a poem I had written almost two years ago, shortly before covid hit the US, about meeting for breakfast with a friend. That friend still doesn’t want to meet in restaurants. We talk occasionally at church, but there just isn’t the connection that we had once had. So I’m hoping that we’ll eventually be able to share a meal together and also thinking fondly of when we used to meet.

Here’s a link to the poem on the Fathom site: https://www.fathommag.com/stories/breakfast.