Dinner in the Closet with Songs Delilah Wouldn’t Play

Romantic Dinner night is probably our oldest standing tradition.  Its first Facebook documentation was August 19, 2009; it might have gotten a mention on MySpace, but we have long since deleted that account.  More important than the longevity of our social media accounts is that Romantic Dinner has been around since the beginning (or really the second beginning, but who’s counting).  While some of our traditions, especially the various meals, came about gradually, romantic dinner night was one that we put together very intentionally.  Although we didn’t actually call it romantic dinner night, it was” having a meal together with just the two of us once a week night”.  As with most very obviously named meals, romantic dinner night was the label put on it by a then 6-year-old Shannon.   There were some other things too, like going on a real date at least once a month and dancing, but those haven’t consistently stuck for various reasons including budgets, babysitters, and venues.  Romantic dinner night, however, doesn’t require a babysitter, the meal can be as cheap or fancy as you want, and it doesn’t require a venue other than the kitchen table.

Romantic dinner night started when we were still in law school, and I had a late Monday night class and Alex didn’t.  So, he would fix a very lovely South Beach friendly meal, while watching (or as he would say watching with his ear) the Monday Night football game.  When I got home, he would switch to the romantic music cable radio station, and we would have a candlelit dinner.  At some point along the way, we switched to listening to Delilah on the radio.  While listening to everyone’s super sappy love songs, we thought it would be fun to get ours or at least our song on the radio.  We tried on several occasions over the course of a couple of years; we even tried to get her to play “Sweet Caroline” since Caroline wasn’t always on board with the romantic dinner night plan.  Unfortunately, Delilah never played our song, but I did make Alex a mix CD (remember those things) called Songs Delilah wouldn’t play. 

Most romantic dinner nights don’t really stand out. We’ve moved the day of the week around work and school schedules, who cooks, and what we eat has changed over time as well.  The most memorable romantic dinner night was relatively early on.  We had a really big walk-in closet that had become quite the mess from joining two households and trying to figure out the best furniture arrangements, and admittedly because we’re notoriously bad at keeping our closet clean.  On this particular night, we had finally gotten everything all clean and organized, so to celebrate Alex set up the card table and candles literally in the closet.  The meal was really good too. 

These days romantic dinner nights are generally a charcuterie tray, if you want to be fancy, or meat and cheese if charcuterie is a little too high-brow, and it’s generally accented by at least one child coming in to steal a piece of bruschetta.  Conversation has always varied over romantic dinner, but with quarantine and the election we decided to mix things up a bit. We decided to reach into the Cesarz family playbook and literally picked a book to read and discuss over dinner.  Normally, we would pick something that would be considered a little more “literary”, but since it’s a romantic dinner night we went with a good old Nicholas Sparks book.    

Admittedly, we haven’t had romantic dinner night every week over the last 16 years, but we’ve come pretty close.  It’s pretty amazing how simple something so important can be.