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Singapore is a country where we greet, “Have you eaten?” instead of, “How are you?”. In the last few days, that’s been sublimated for, “What will your last hawker center meal be?”

Leading up to such doomsday declarations, round hawker center seats, once dappled with packets of tissue paper to reserve dining domain while gathering dishes from various stalls, had been alternately duct-taped with red Xs, like some kind of Bill Belichick defense blitz.

The idea of no longer eating elbow-to-elbow, a grudging delight and of Singapore street food chowing, has finally touched down. Like the American corner diner or Irish everywhere pub, the Singapore hawker center is socializing ground zero. Even eating solo, we draw gluttonous strength in numbers, people watch for dinner theater, digest to the happy humdrum of satisfied sighs. Discourses erupted over these hawker center seat X X Xs - can my kids sit next to me, or do we need to O X O? If my friend and I are sitting O X, can someone sit on the O across from our occupied X? Circuit Breaker ended scrolls and scrolls of confabulations: No eating in, only takeouts from hawker centers (and other types of food outlets).

My final fling was Xin Long Cooked Food at 84 Marine Parade Central, the hawker center definition of me curling into a fetal position, pulling my ear and chomping on my raggedy bolster. For more than 40 years, this economical rice institution has stir-fried the same 20+ dishes everyday, and for three decades, I have sidled up and made the same masquerade of contemplating selections. Perhaps the assam fish, or the radish omelet. Maybe the sambal squid. But my stomach is nobody’s fool, so today, I order what I always did as a teenager working at my dad’s optometry practice or visiting home during 12 years of Chicago living: beef rendang, winter melon scrambled with eggs, chap chye and bittergourd stir-fry. I actually thought to go out with a bang and get the sambal squid, but there was no more room on the plate.

Perched on my O with a table to myself, I pegged down a long, tall glass of kopi-o-kosong peng to the left of my plate and splayed out the day’s New York Times to my right. It was a very luxurious spread. I could get used to this?