There’s a tiny town in my province, plopped right in the middle of Canadian farmland. Its population is roughly 1300, and its two biggest attractions are a federal prison and an old railcar diner.
Although you can’t see the prison from the highway, you’re blind if you miss the “Starlight Diner Car.” A red neon sign sits above the entryway and it has a UFO permanently parked on the rooftop. Nobody knows the alien origin story here.
In true small-town-on-the-highway form, you’ll see at least ten big rigs parked out front of this diner on any given day. It’s exactly the type of setting you’d expect to see at a truck stop.
I’ve eaten at this diner a handful of times in years gone by, always at the same small booth in the back corner. The menu here consists of delicious dishes my grandma would’ve made. Hearty home cooking, usually slathered in gravy.
Somebody’s grandma definitely works here.
Each time I dined here I had just finished a visit at the prison. Family will do that to you. I bet half the customers in this diner either work at the prison or come after a visit. I always felt like the waitress knew, as if I was wearing a name tag that read, “Hi, my name is: ‘Prison Fam.’”
Regardless, we’re all getting a taste of life, incognito, at a random highway joint.
Right next to this diner is exactly what you’d expect to see in a town like this - a rundown motel with white, plastic yard chairs outside each door. You can probably get a room for $28.00 a night because they know there’s no reason on earth you’d need to sleep in this town.
If you were planning to run away from your old life and start fresh, this is exactly the type of place you’re scripted to run to.
Doesn’t Hollywood do a fantastic job of showing us how possible it is to scrounge together $47.63 in crumpled-up money and run away to start a new life by waitressing in a small-town diner?
Alfre Woodard did it in Juanita.
Jennifer Lopez did it in An Unfinished Life.
Somehow, the women in these movies always seem to MAKE IT in obscure little towns exactly like this one. And we, the viewers, always WANT them to make it.
A woman (who does not have the Eat, Pray, Love budget of Elizabeth Gilbert) gets off a Greyhound bus in the middle of nowhere. She’s got nothing but a suitcase in tow.
After crushing out a cigarette on the pavement, she walks into the nearest diner and asks for a job. The crotchety old boss gives it to her because he can see she’s down on her luck.
Eventually, the local folks warm up to her and slowly take her in as one of their own. Then she ends up falling in love with the only deputy in town, moves out of the rundown motel, redecorates a dusty little trailer she saved up all her tips for, and in a few months? You’ll find her sitting under a big oak tree, gently smiling with her eyes closed while she peacefully exhales.
She has made it…whatever her ‘IT’ happens to be. And we were rooting for her the whole time, dammit!
Every time I watch one of those movies, I feel like it’s waaay more appealing than it should be. There’s something so wholesome and freeing about the thought of going A.W.O.L. and turning up in “the diner” to start a fresh life.
It’s borderline Hallmark movie but with a lot more struggle and grit.
In fact, these kinds of reinvention stories are so weirdly appealing that I’d be the type to go and try it, just to write the story. I want to see for myself if it’s possible to win at life in its most basic form.
In case you were unaware, everything I’ve written up until this point was a repost from another publication, back in a time when I had a little more wild and a LOT more ‘get up and go’ in me.
Here’s what I’ve come to realize after years of being oddly drawn to those stories: you don’t actually have to get on a Greyhound bus to make big changes in your life. It shouldn’t take a tiny town with a neon diner sign and a shady motel to become someone new.
You don’t need a cigarette (because maybe you quit smoking years ago), or a deputy waiting in the wings (because maybe you’re too dead inside for romance 😆).
I know at least one person reading this definitely needs it, because we’ve already chatted about it offline.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped romanticizing the idea of running away and started noticing something much simpler. The same kind of reset those women go looking for in the movies can happen without a cinematic exit with perfect dusky lighting.
There’s no big moment where you step off a bus and declare a new beginning. It’s more like one day you look around and realize something has shifted.
And oddly enough, it often begins in the same place those comeback stories do….right at home, while you’re gazing out the window at all the fat birds in your backyard.
If we choose to believe it, those movie endings were never really about the diner or the town or the love story. They were about the feeling of starting over in a way that feels possible. We just got used to believing it had to happen somewhere else.
But maybe the greatest comeback stories of all time don’t begin with leaving everything behind. Maybe they begin with kicking “right now” in the ass and deciding this life and this version of you still has something left to give.
And then you begin again.
If you didn’t need a bus ticket or a brand new town, what’s one small shift you’d make in your life right now?
What part of your life is begging for a glow-up…without you abandoning the whole thing?
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