It was a Sunday morning. Easy. Early, earlier than I usually get up on Sundays. I forget the date and why I was up then, but I had definitely stayed over my friend’s place in Astoria after having gone out there Saturday night. That in itself put me in a good state of mind starting seven hours earlier – that moment of relief after asking to crash, getting the yes, and promptly pouring another cupful of beer instead of weaseling away to catch the subway that you’re bound to miss on the way to the station anyway.

If you’ve never been to the Neptune Diner in Astoria, by Astoria Boulevard, please go there. If you think the only reason to head up there is for the Beer Garden (not the Studio Square “Beer Garden,” the real one at 24th Ave & 29th St), you’re in luck, because the Neptune Diner is only a few blocks from there, and a little closer to all the subways or cabs you’ll need. You may ask, as I did to myself, why a Greek diner in the most Greek place on Earth outside of Greece is called the Neptune Diner and not the Poseidon Diner. I have no answer for you, or for me, but as far as I’m concerned they can call themselves whatever they want as long as they provide me with breakfast whenever I need it whether the sun is out or not.

Well, the sun was up, the sky was blue, and I had ordered some scrambled eggs and some bacon. I used to get bacon omelettes from Neptune all the time when I used to live over in Astoria, but somewhere along the way, after I’d moved, I started getting just the bacon with the scrambled eggs – they’re not cooked quite as long, they’re a little softer, a little creamier. Either way, I would be getting home fries – actual ones, not french fries, because as you know and Neptune knows but other diners don’t, those are not the same as home fries. I would also get toast. And when I go out to breakfast and get this kind of food, I’m not going to health it up and flavor it down and get whole wheat toast. That I can do during the week before or after my oatmeal. I was getting white toast. And I was looking forward to it all, one because I was hung over, two because it was a beautiful day outside, and three because I hadn’t been to Neptune for breakfast during breakfast hours in years.

The food was brought out soon enough. I ate it almost as quickly, barely tasting though very much enjoying what I’d so anticipated. I left the toast for almost last, though I incorporated it here and there during the meal. But I finished the main courses before finishing the toast, so I had a few bites left of the toast itself.

I wish I could tell you the little details about it, whether both sides of the toast had been buttered (sometimes you get that), whether it was cut in half triangularwise or rectangularly, or even cut at all. Those things, if I ever knew them, faded away. What sticks with me is two bites and one bit of observation. The first bite after the meal, the one of toast alone, was fucking delicious. I wasn’t expecting it, the flavor having been drowned out by the bacon and the eggs. But after the bite, I took a look at what I was dealing with:

The bread was toasted to a light-to-medium doneness: Parts were still whitish but others were golden, or a little bit orange. The depth of penetration of the butter was about 3/4 of the way from the top down; the yellow of the butter from the top firmly met the beige of the bread from the bottom (any butter on the bottom itself didn’t bleed through, that much I know); the butter was spread nearly perfectly and evenly from crust to crust, pleasing me to know that the flavor of the bites I had left would be nearly comparable; the integrity of the bread was still unfazed, telling me the butter was either warm or soft while it was spread with the appearance of an almost motherly care.

Many of these traits are ones I typically try to emulate while buttering my own damn bread but it’s never easy. Everything has to come together just right — after I had tasted what I’d tasted and seen what I’d seen, I took another bite, to make a memory, and knew that that Sunday morning in Astoria, everything did.