I recently watched the movie “A Prairie Home Companion” and if you’re a fan of the radio show, as I am, you’ll enjoy the movie. I find Garrison Keillor’s dry wit and humor to be entertaining and my wife apparently finds it relaxing. So much so that she chose to critique the movie with her eye’s closed, letting out intermittent snores and snorts of approval.

I was pleasantly surprised at the beginning of the movie by the location of the opening scene, Mickey’s Diner in St. Paul Minnesota. About 13 years ago I had one of the best patty melts I’ve ever eaten in that particular restaurant. I haven’t been back there since and I think my cholesterol is still reeling from that half pound of greasy goodness.

My college roommate, Chris Shafer, and I went to Minneapolis to watch the Vikings and Cowboys play. Actually, neither of us was that interested in the game and spent most of it fighting over the binoculars to watch the cheerleaders and scan the crowd for “weirdoes.” There must have been a lot of them sitting close by us because there were a lot of binoculars and fingers pointing our way.

The game was just a good excuse to spend a weekend “taste testing” in the Twin Cities. Since I had recently had a debilitating crocheting accident I had to find a new hobby while I healed up, and taste testing was as good as any.

After a long, rigorous night of taste testing, bad dancing, and general obnoxious behavior we made the decision to exchange our liquid diet for some solids. In a city, or cities, so big you would think this would be easy, but apparently not a lot of restaurants cater to the 3 a.m. bad dancing obnoxious crowd.

The blind led the obnoxious and we drove, and drove, until our jovial taste testing mood turned hungrier and uglier with every darkened diner we past. Then it appeared, an old fashioned dining car style restaurant, all lit up and filled with weary taste testers.

It never occurred to two small town boys that the kind of people that are out and about at 3 a.m. in St. Paul would be any different than us, but when we entered the diner we found that they were all indeed different. Several were carrying on heated animated debates with themselves or someone only they could see.

There weren’t two stools next to each other open when we came in but a nice man offered to move his hefty bag so Shaf and I could cower nervously next to each other. I struck up a conversation with the hefty bag man and he proceeded to tell me his life story. A very long very sad story.

The sort of story I suppose that is best told to a stranger. The sort of story that clearly explained how one might find themselves sitting in a diner at 3 a.m. with everything they own in a hefty sack. The sort of story that made me appreciate the world I was brought up in and the path I was on.

The sort of story that makes a college kid order two patty melts. One for himself and the other for someone he hopes to never be. Of all the things I spent my student loan money on that patty melt taught me the most.