f the American diner Henry Miller once wrote, "Everything is at its worst in this type of eating place." We must allow Henry his verve, but need not accede to his accuracy. For if everything is at its worst in such places, it is also at its best.

Best, that is, in the American sense of the word.

Meaning not subtle or shy or in modest quantities. Whether a slice of apple pie a la mode or a t-bone steak or a bottomless cup of thick black coffee, it is robust, it is big, it will fill your belly and put hair on your chest and send you back on the road to wherever the hell you're going (or imagine you're going) feeling as if you've never left home. Or, for that matter, ever gone anywhere in particular other than the huge, brawling, un-pin-downable confabulation of superhighways and byways and deserts and urban sprawl and dainty villages and greasy truck stops and you name it known as The United States of America.

Not all Americans drive trucks, but in our hearts we're all truck-drivers, renegades, mavericks, which is to say, cowboys. We get on those highways and start driving and next thing you know, we're looking for a place to eat.

The chuck wagons are gone; so are most of the orange-gabled HoJos.

Our only hope is the diner.

I'm speaking, of course, about those stainless-steel, streamlined wonders along the highway (even if they're not alongside a highway, they ought to be), glimmering brightly as though fresh from silicon molds, trying (but not exactly succeeding) to look like Pullman railroad cars; 'cuz that's what they used to be, back in olden days when two-bit entrepreneurs took to fashioning greasy spoons out of discarded rolling stock. Rip out the seats, put in a counter and stools and griddle, add a hundred gallons of liquefied lard and, voila: Restaurantus Americanus.

You've seen the place: you've been in it. As a boy you spun on the stools, kicking the chin of the trucker beside you, who gave you your first bona fide dirty look. As a teenager you had your first slice of diner apple-pie there. You know, the one in the glass and chrome hat box? No mere apple pie, but a metaphor for the Land of the Free; symbol of Home of the Brave. And though the emblemic apple pie may not exactly have been free, at fifty cents a slice it was enough of a bargain.

As for brave, you had be brave to order it, since you had no idea how long it'd been sitting there.