A Table in Dedham

There is a table in Dedham that plays host to a meeting once a year. Some might call it a booth. It’s even been a bar once. I think it was at a counter top once, too. Anyways, there is table. At this table friends gather to commemorate a glorious time they shared together. A time fraught with laughter and movie quotes, and above all a shared enjoyment of not just the work they did but of each other’s company.

This is the yearly gathering of the Dedham Mirror alumni staff.

At the 50's Diner these one-time school newspaper editors come to pay tribute to the rag that they spent many a late night laboring over, editing an article one minute and confirming the latest school gossip the next. While their journalism days are behind them, the time spent in Mr. Nilsen’s classroom (sometimes we call him Jeff) soldered a bond that remains solid to this day.

Why the 50's Diner? Maybe it’s the feeling that we’re sharing a connection with journalists of yesteryear, surrounded by 1950's memorabilia while we flag down the waitress for some more coffee to be poured into our faded mugs. Maybe it’s the 50's breakfast platter. Whatever the reason, the alumni staff have found solace at that hallowed Dedham eatery. Most years there are a handful of staffers that make the pilgrimage. Sometimes there are a few booths worth. One time there was just one who came to sit down with our fearless leader. As Mr. Nilsen has said, he will keep doing this as long as people continue to show up.

While the group has grown old and has spread out across the country (I’m looking at you, Beth), the topic of conversation hasn’t changed that much. What movies have you seen? or Do you remember when he said that to Juli in class? are annual queries that come up. Inevitably someone suggests that we should write something for the paper again. An insider’s perspective from the outside world so to speak. As the years pile on, our priorities have shifted and sitting down to pen a quick OP-ED always take a backseat.

Then COVID-19 happened.

In as many years as I can remember, this is the first time that the Dedham Mirror alumni staff will not occupy a booth at the 50s Diner in Dedham for the holidays. But does that stop them from commemorating the occasion?

No way.

So while we are doing our best to combat the pandemic, I take comfort in knowing that my fellow staffers are twiddling away at their keyboards, trying to encapsulate what one lunch out of 364 other lunches out of the year could possibly mean to you, our beloved Dedham Mirror readers. All you need to know is this:

I wouldn’t trade that damn lunch for anything in the world.

-Dan Withrow, Class of 2007

The first time I sat at the 50s Breakfast club’s table in January 2010, the Great Recession had only just bottomed out. Dedham’s unemployment rate had just started to climb down from close to ten percent.

Legacy Place had just opened in the crater where my favorite movie theater used to be. I had the distinct impression that most of the customers lived out of town. 50s Diner increasingly looked like the border crossing to a vastly older and cozier world.

Too, the preceding year was an important one for me. I had just finished my first semester at Northeastern University. The world became a scarier and seemingly hopeless place, and I came to the conclusion my writing skills were not worth gambling on. With that in mind, I put my plans of building a writing career on what would become a very dusty shelf. I learned to my chagrin that you can share all of the interests in the world with the people in your dorm hall, it does not mean you will necessarily get along with them. It was definitely me and not them.

For breakfast that day, I ordered the 50s Special Platter-scrambled eggs with american cheese on top, eight slices of bacon, homefries, and pancakes with sugar and butter. I traded in-jokes with my fellow Mirror alumni. The fun thing about working with such a team of incredibly creative and funny people is that they will turn anything into a running gag. A plagiarized review of American Gangster, a DIY reenactment of an SNL rap song about Chronicles of Narnia. Every other line in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Every line in A Christmas Story. A former editor who quit the paper in a bitter rage accidentally tripped into immortality when he took a shot at our sitting Editor-in-Chief by calling her “Juli-too-good-for-the-e”. It had been a long year, too interesting by half, and I liked sharing a trashy meal with friends I could still call good, instead of old.

In 2011 I committed completely to a major in software development. 2013 had two landmarks: me having to take a year off for medical leave and terrorists bombing the Boston Marathon. In 2014, I finally sought the mental health care I needed and was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. That fall, I met the love of my life, I had met the love of my life, Erin.

The fourth time I sat with the team was in January 2015. I had just come back from meeting Erin’s parents for the first time. On that day in January 2015, I had the 50s Special Platter again. I remember taking half of it to go. Later in 2015: the best movie critic on our staff and certainly one of the funniest men I ever met would marry his fiancée.

Six months into 2015, Donald Trump would start a presidential campaign a great many experts would call a ‘long shot’. By the end of the year, ISIS had overrun half my parents’ home country of Syria. Much of it was overshadowed by the uncertainty for the lives and safety of most of my extended family.

My tenth meeting with the Breakfast Club was in January 2020. We focused on the things that were indisputably ours: Our jokes, our lives, our loves, gratuitous references to old movies. The critic I alluded to had two children and another editor had since married her husband. By then, I ordered my 50s Special with a new lifehack: blueberries in the pancakes. I spent much of the time excitedly talking about our upcoming wedding and failed to eat most of my food again.

The first American case of COVID-19 occurred on the 19th. By then, ISIS had since been stomped out of Syria, Syria had left the global headlines and Donald Trump was ending his first term in office. The first national lockdown would occur that spring. Erin and I would lose our jobs and wedding to the economic and political chaos that ensued. Exactly a month after when our wedding in Bar Harbor was scheduled, my wife and I eloped in Central Park, New York City on July 13th, one of the most beautiful days of my life. Three days later, twenty four hours after we returned home, my wife’s cat Ritter suffered congestive heart failure. He made it.

Next month would have been my eleventh meeting with the Mirror team, but the pandemic forced us to break the tradition for the first time in literal decades. Eleven months ago, back in January 2020, I remember leaving and thinking that perhaps a year was a long time to wait before seeing these awesome people again, that perhaps I would hit some of them up for movies, drinks, lunch, dinner, or most appropriately, brunch.

-Rani Aljondi, Class of 2009