Past, Present and Future

On Friday, I had a little preview into my future and my past all at once. We stopped on our way home to have dinner at an all-you-can-eat place that we used to go to a lot when we were kids. To be honest, when we drove past, I was surprised to find that it was still there. It's probably been 15 years since I last went there, and prior to that, it would have been another 5 years since I last visited. It was a Polynesian themed chain store that I thought had gone out of business a long time ago when all the other all-you-can-eat stores fell out of favour – around about the time that salmonella poisoning got a lot of media.

We stopped at KJ’s request, not my own, because I’m very anti all-you-can-eat. There are a whole heap of reasons why, the most prominent being that I don’t like to eat anything that looks as if it has formed its own protective coating in the indeterminate amount of time it has spent slowly congealing in a bain-marie.

I was shocked when we walked in to find that in the last 15 years not a single thing had changed. And I mean NOTHING. It was as if time inside the restaurant froze the second I walked out 15 years ago, and re-started when I walked back inside. The same 80’s carpet, same half-hearted Polynesian ‘artefacts’. The same old boat shaped salad bar, same plastic plants, same padded wicker chairs. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the same customers as there had been when I last left. Everything looked exactly as it had 15 years ago, not even the regular telltale signs of age showed. No fading, no patches, no replacement parts – 100% pristine, preserved buffet splendour. Even the food hadn’t changed (although that’s pretty typical of an all-you-can-eat restaurant).

As we were seated, feeling like we had stepped into a time capsule, I suddenly got a glimpse into my future. The reason we had stopped there was because we needed to have an early dinner and it was the best option available. It was 5:30pm, and as we sipped on lukewarm, soggy vegetable soup, the seats around us filled up with senior citizens. I suddenly came to the realisation that maybe I wasn’t looking into my past so much as straight into my future! I never thought that life coming full circle would involve a return to dodgy all-you-can-eat restaurants, but I guess the future is unpredictable!