Some days one crosses a threshold for the first time: the step may not be planned; the opportunity simply presents itself; it may be the only door open at the time. The choices are to turn around and go back or to pass through that particular door even if for the first time. Is it the right thing to do? One doesn't know; that gets figured out once inside.

Fridays mornings at 7:00AM, I and Rick, a friend, get together for breakfast at a local restaurant. It is not every Friday; there are times one of us is out of town (in Rick's case, out of the country), has a conflicting commitment, or (during this winter) is snowed in. Needless to say, there usually is little competition for a table at the restaurant at this time of the day, day of the week, and season of the year.With rare exception, a particular table is available in a far corner of the dining room. This table has become "our table"--a distinction remembered by wait staff and acknowledged in good humor by local folks.

Typically, there are a half a dozen local folks, who also frequent the diner early on a Friday morning. (I suspect many of the same folks are there everyday and not just on Fridays.) These folks--males of the species--customarily arrive singly and, only rarely, in pairs. They occupy two or three tables off to one corner of the restaurant--a corner opposite to "our table." I guess you could call this area the "locals' table." Folks come and go at irregular intervals. The waitress buses the individual place setting as each is freed up either before or after the next person joins the group already at the table. Tips left on the table are often pushed into a pile at the center of the table and left to accumulate as the turnover in breakfasters continue for a two or three hour period each morning. The waitress picks them up apparently when she gets around to it. (I hope it is not when she determines it is of an amount worth bothering with.) As I approach thirty years residence in this community, I had not chosen to seat myself at the locals' table--until this morning, that is.

The restaurant was busy. When I arrived at 6:50AM, there wasn't a free table in the place. I suspect the popularity of the ice caves within the Apostles Islands National Lakeshore explains the busyness of the place at this particular time, on this particular day, during this particular season. A substantial number of visitors were getting fueled up before heading out on their iced lake shore adventures; a few local folks seated around two of the three local tables were doing much the same with very different adventures planned for their days. Rather impulsively--yet with considerable style I can assure you, I asked Bob if I could join him at one of the tables used by the morning regulars.  He was the only occupant at the moment at a table with seating for five. There was substantial evidence of prior occupancy: soiled napkins, crumbs and a smear of jam on the vinyl table cloth, used coffee cup, and budding pile of tip change. Since this encounter involved a one-on-one interaction, I felt confident that I could invite myself with minimal the risk of a rejection of my audacious self-invitation. A short time later, Harold and Gary joined Bob and me. Rick arrived 10 or 15 minutes thereafter. After Bob left, Bill slipped into the vacant chair. During some 90 minutes what ensued was a genuine local experience. We talked about kids, the effect of topography on ambient temperatures, the tolerance of freezing temperatures by perennial fruit crops, fishing, colony collapse disorder, unpredictable changes in ice conditions on Lake Superior, winter camping, snowshoeing, and timber cruising. All of these topics in one way or another, directly or indirectly, referenced the unspoken but clearly evident fact that the six of us, who sat around that table this Friday morning, were in the seventh or eighth decade of our lives.

All in all, it was a lot like making it to the grown-ups' table at the family holiday dinner. In that context, I suspect one has to be invited to move up to the "big table." A self-invitation does quite do it. One might be able to self-engineer such a move. One could volunteer to set the "big table" and in so doing set a place for himself in the hope that the grown-ups will just assume that someone has extended an invitation to the new guy at the table. My experience has been that the mother-in-charge will have counted and recounted the place settings at both the grown-ups' and the kids' tables along with visualizing the individual face that goes with each setting. It is therefore unlikely that one will be able to get away with this subversive act.

Then again, it doesn't hurt to ask.