Greetings, friends. (XLI)

Greetings, friends. Today I would like to memorialize my old high school era stomping grounds, the Denny’s restaurant in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania.

The very first review of this restaurant on Yelp wrote in 2008 says it all:

No lie, all the kids I went to High School with would live at this Denny's. Even through college and afterwards they'd still go there…

Well, that would have been me, but about ten years earlier, years before Yelp ever existed. The reviewer goes on to add:

Would recommend if you want to kvetch about your lives or make fun of people you went to high school with not moving on with theirs. Especially if you like Monte Cristo sammishes.

Most of the other reviews delve into more conventional details, like how the staff is hapless, or the food arrives late and is terrible.

That wasn’t a problem for me and my friends when we were in high school, because we never ate there. No, we’d roll up three or six deep, and order nothing but bottomless coffee, and sit there smoking cigarettes for hours. If I really wanted to splurge, I’d scrape the bottom of the change drawer at home and order fries. But not very often.

That Denny’s, right on the border of Springfield and Clifton Heights, was the crossroads of three high school districts and a couple dioceses. The restaurant was in prior times across the street from a massive indoor flea market called the Bazaar of All Nations, which is a whole other story that someone made a film about. Denny’s was the only place in either town that a minor could hang out at after about 10pm.

So we did. My friends and I would have endless freewheeling teenaged bull sessions. We got to know kids from other schools. I drank so much late night coffee there that I practically ruined my circadian rhythm for life. More than a few times, if I found myself without social plans on a weekend, I would walk the 2¼ miles alone in the dark from my dad and stepmom’s, crossing my fingers that I’d get there and find someone I knew who would give me a ride home. I got that ride back not infrequently.

We had a waitress named Jolene whom we loved, because she would hang out and chat with us and never gave us a lick of hassle for taking up a 6-top for hours and she would sometimes sneak us fries from the kitchen and we always tipped her more than the check was worth. She’d slide up to the table, pad and pen in hand, and say “D’jeet yet?” the way people in Delco do, even though she knew we never ordered food. She was so dependable in this regard that it got to be a running gag between me and Matt.

“D’jeet yet?” “Naw, d’joo?”

Anyway, thousands of teenagers over the years lived and thrived and cried and had whole romances and chain smoked and laughed together and gossiped and read poetry and were sullen and plotted social intrigue and did their homework and contemplated suicide in that Denny’s.

I wound up spending most of my college years back in Delaware County and I would still hang out there. My friends and I actually built a choose-your-own-adventure style interactive web application in, I think it was 1996 or 1997, that we called “Online Denny’s”.

Online Denny’s had graphics and photos of the restaurant interior and I even made a mock logo in Photoshop. By clicking around in the browser page, you could wander from area to area in the Denny’s, and have interactions with various people there. In the game, you didn’t have enough money to order anything besides coffee, although, if you checked the coin return slot of the payphone by the bathroom, there was a chance of finding a quarter.

For those of you who keep track of such things, this was a server-side application, because JavaScript barely existed back then, and I didn’t know any other languages besides Pascal, so I wrote it it in C. Imagine for a moment writing a choose-your-own-adventure web app in C in 1996.

We billed it as “the Internet’s first online dining experience.” Online Denny’s has not been online in over two decades.

Denny’s was a great place to go nowhere in life. I drank my first legal beer at the Clifton Heights Denny’s when I turned 21. I’m not sorry I left and mostly I don’t miss it.

Nevertheless, it was with no small amount of nostalgia that I received from Matt a screenshot of a photo posted to Facebook by Danielle. Our beloved and detested Denny’s restaurant, which apparently closed during the COVID-19 pandemic, has been completely remodeled and reopened as a medical marijuana dispensary.

The winning comment on Danielle’s post was written by Katie, who replied, “Seems like a fitting place. I can't even count how many times i was high in there lol”

Dear Lord. Me too, Katie. Me too.

If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est. See ya tomorrow.