June 23: Lingering Breakfast

I've said it before and I'm about to say it again. There's nothing like breakfast by the sea. To me, this is one of the great pleasures of living in Greater Fort Lauderdale. I do it as often as I can. And during my annual staycation on the Fort Lauderdale beach, I make a point to savor as many oceanside breakfasts with my girlfriend as possible in our week at a local hotel. I mention all this because I recently enjoyed an unusually long breakfast at a café by the Atlantic. No, not during a staycation. It was after an important business meeting, actually, something related to the nonprofit group I founded. My organization, the Humanity Project, received a key sponsorship the other morning from the Broward Sheriff's Office. BSO is the largest fully accredited sheriff's department in the nation and a vital partner in this community. So this was a big step forward for our group.

My Humanity Project colleague, Rebecca, and I decided to celebrate the news with a lovely breakfast together. We drove over to Las Olas, paid the master meter and walked to one of the pretty cafes on A1A nearby. It was a beautiful, warm morning with a crystalline sea reflecting the sunlight. People were walking on the beach, swimming in the waves and generally settling into another summery day.

Rebecca and I sat chatting over our coffee for a bit. We talked about our meeting with the sheriff and the other wonderful folks from BSO who helped us. We talked about our group and the work we're doing in South Florida and beyond. All this before even ordering. When the food came, my fried eggs were tasty and I scarfed everything down quickly. But the day and the weather and the setting by the ocean, all these things felt so relaxing and inviting that we just lingered. The chat soon shifted topics to our friends and families and more. We covered a lot of ground during all this talking and the patient waitress just kept refilling our coffee cups. For hours. At some point, I looked around and the café was filling up with people eating lunch. They were opening bottles of white wine and putting them back in ice buckets and they were ordering margaritas and rum runners. Obviously this was a vacation crowd and just as obviously Rebecca and I had been hanging at that café for a long time. It was an excellent morning. And honestly, I didn't want to go back to the car even when we both felt the need to leave at last. That's the only problem with breakfast by the sea. It can be awfully hard to get on with the rest of your day after such a delightful start. Though I guess that's not really such a bad problem when you think about it.