Two days ago, I was prompted to do something that I’ve done thousands of times in my life, but which has become so unfashionable as to border on socially inappropriate: I was asked, in a public facility, to bow my head and pray before eating the breakfast I’d paid for.

I was traveling over the weekend, and spent Friday night at a bed-and-breakfast in Black Mountain, a small town east of Asheville. I’d never been to Black Mountain before, and was thoroughly charmed by the place. There are lots of neo-hippies there for whom Asheville has become too corporate, man, which gives the town a funky appeal. There are good restaurants, numerous galleries of the arty kind, and mountains in every direction you look. Billy Graham’s home may be just up the road in Montreat, but in Black Mountain there is alcohol available by the glass — thankfully.

On Saturday morning, the inn’s guests — many of whom were loitering on the front porch with coffee — were herded into the dining room when the breakfast buffet was set up at 8:30. It seemed peculiar for the serving of breakfast to be so regimented, but the reason was quickly apparent. Before eating, the husband-and-wife proprietors thanked everyone for staying at the inn, described the various breakfast choices, and then asked everyone to join them in a blessing and prayer.

So we did. All two dozen of us reverently cast our eyes downward as God was thanked for the bounty and beseeched to guide us safely as we set forth that day. Meanwhile, the thought running through my head was the inverse of Dorothy’s everlasting utterance to Toto: We’re not in Oz anymore. We’re back in god-fearing Kansas.

You just don’t see a group of strangers who have nothing in common except that they all checked into the same hotel led in prayer like that anymore. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether the world is worse or better for it.

I’m neutral on the matter. I’m a committed backslider, but the prayer carried a comforting echo of my youth, when every dinner was preceded by a blessing. (Somehow, breakfasts and lunches seemed to be exempt). Prayers were also offered before sporting events and almost all formal meetings of any kind. Once, as a rookie reporter, I was called on by a township supervisor I’d antagonized to say the opening prayer at a board meeting, a request that came with no warning and was clearly aimed at embarrassing me. But all that praying in my youth left me well-prepared. My prayer was this: “Lord, help me to be fair and help the board members to be honest. I know that second part’s gonna take a lot of work.”

But until this weekend, I couldn’t have told you the last time I’d heard a public prayer in a secular setting. It’s been years, I’m sure. I don’t know if there was any cause and effect, but that was the best breakfast I’ve had in ages.