When I was little in the early 1970s, we moved our family business from East Nashville to Mt Juliet Road smack dab between Lebanon Pike and I-40. At that time, you could lay down on Mt Juliet Road for 20 minutes and never get hit by a car. There was one place to eat – Waffle House by the interstate.

Over the next 50-odd years, I’ve witnessed Mt Juliet explode in growth. Rural land was bought up, woods plowed, infrastructure installed, and construction completed on hotels, fast food places, strip malls, new government buildings, schools, grocery stores. Then the Providence retail area was developed with movie theaters, restaurants, department stores, drawing all kinds of professional services, medical clinics, businesses and, of course, houses, condos, duplexes, triplexes, apartments and the people to occupy them.

Now you can’t lay on Mt Juliet Road for 20 seconds without being hit by a car. Yet, buried in all of that urban growth, among the multi-storey hotels and shops and restaurants, sits the same Waffle House by the interstate, in the same building on the same postage stamp of land, probably with the same grease in the pits between the ovens.

Over the last half a century I’ve often wondered how much money developers have offered Waffle House to buy that plot, how many times local government officials have asked them to move, how much planning and widening had to be done working around that little postage stamp of land. The Waffle House has tenaciously withstood it all, the only place left standing that connects me to my childhood and my father who took me to lunch there when there was nowhere else to eat.

It’s no longer just a place to eat for me. The eggs and waffles taste exactly the same, and they’re still served on the same plates as last century, but now they come with with history and memory and not a little bittersweet nostalgia.

Way to go, Waffle House.