Everyone Knows Your Name

Just got back from breakfast at our very local restaurant.

Like the TV serial Cheers, at our place everyone knows your name. Also like Cheers most of the regulars know everyone else’s business. It’s a place that when they see you pull into the parking lot they put the coffee and ice water on the table. Our favorite server, Annette, waves from a distance but if busy, is not able to come over to the table to chat until our meals are ready. She already has them on order long before we walk in the door. There’s something to be said about predictability.

And drama.

Like the other TV sitcom, Mel’s Diner, there is a lot of drama at our local eatery. Drama on the job when one server steals tips from another’s table and drama in the personal lives: boyfriends, ex-husbands, kids running amok, serious illnesses, divorce. jail. And then there are the customers who order water or coffee and bring their own treats from the local bakery and play cards all morning with their friends, all in their eighties. When I’m eighty maybe I’ll have that kind of nerve.

Twice we’ve seen the police talking to cooks and bus boys at the back door of the place. My imagination runs wild but I’ll wait to report on that when I see it in the newspaper.

The food is good. And cheap.

No one is in a hurry for the table to be vacated and we sit and drink coffee and work the morning Sudoku, crossword puzzles and word scrambles.

And listen. We hear Bible studies in one corner, in another home builders on the phone with their work crews who are already at a job site, a pastor meeting with two of her parishioners, job seekers being interviewed for jobs, a regular who is now walking with a cane.

And a 101- year old who could not even be four feet tall driving into the lot in a huge battleship of a car. When she parks, and it takes awhile, one or two of the servers will go out to the car and help her in. She comes in early but always orders lunch.

And cell phones. Especially the hot-shot builders who have not located the vibrate button on the phone. And others who think, like my parents did when it was long distance, that one must talk really loudly to be heard on a cell. One 70 year old teaching another of equal age how to text message.

A little snippet of life in this city. That’s what I’m thinking about.