The view from the very last booth - #2

AKA The Diner

(One programming note: Going forward, for brevity, I’m going to call this series “The Diner”. So, the next edition will be The Diner - #3. TVFTVLB is just too damn long.)

So, when we left off, I had just found this quaint little country diner next to a small air strip out in the country. It was a very Writerly place straight out of my utterly unfounded visions of the kinds places where writers write.

I would write there… and if I understood the protocol correctly, someday when I was well dead, someone would show up with a dogeared copy of the book I have yet to conceive and will likely never write and ask for “the last booth on the left, please.”

The person at the counter would then stare back blankly because, in truth, there is only one booth on the left but I had mistakenly thought there were two initially and now we’re all locked into this “very last booth” concept when really it’s just the one on the left under the air conditioner - which has absolutely no romantic panache whatsoever.

That realization will be the first of a series of disappointments for my imaginary future fan.

In my defense, there is a fairly large pastry case right on your left when you walk in and its contents played at least some role in distracting me from carefully surveilling the layout behind it. I don’t think that can be held against me.

Anyway, let’s move on.

I have now been to The Diner several times. I’ve sat in those little booths, eaten my eggs and toast and just absorbed the whole ebb and flow of the place.

Little local joints with longtime staffs have a rhythm. They have tides. While they might change with the weather or season, there are certain patterns to the comings and goings.

And there is also always an emotional arc to the place. A feeling about it. And it invariably draws its energy from a central person or two. An owner. A manager. A veteran waitperson or bartender who knows everyone who walks in. Someone.

In this place, that person is Jen.

Every morning, five days a week, Jen gets up at 4:30 a.m. while her six-year old is still asleep and heads off to open a small diner staffed by a lone cook and a lone busser where a lone person manages the entire front of house taking orders and serving customers and answering the phones and running take-out.

That person is Jen.

She has been there eight years now. The owner trusts her. He sees her as family and the feeling is mutual.

That explains the picture of the 6-year old tacked up above the register I noted on my first visit.

In a small town place, whether its a diner or deli, pizza place or bar, if there are pictures taped up above the register, the people in it are family or like family…

Regular ol’ staff who come and go without any emotional roots to a place don’t get room on the corkboard. That’s a pretty sacred space and the pictures on it are usually the reasons why the people who tacked them up show up to work each day, work hard, and then go home on heavy, tired feet after grinding away to pay their bills.

If you want to get to know the heart and soul of a small town place like The Diner, ask about the pictures over the register.

The person who put them up is likely the heart. The people in the pictures are likely their soul.

Jen is the emotional heart of The Diner. Her son… or being a mom to him maybe, is her soul.

She shows up in the way most parents do. She takes him to football practice and goes to his games and cheers no matter the score. But more than that, she tends to his joy. She puts time and thought and energy into it. She frets over the little things like which of two places might be the very best for trick or treating.

I like Jen. Or I like what I know of Jen thus far anyway.

I can so understand being a single-parent to a young child who you adore and think about and want to be happy. I can viscerally and completely understand the deep, deep set of emotions that lie beneath the surface of a throw-away comment about where you took your kid trick or treating.

One year, my son didn’t want to dress up in some store-bought costume for Halloween. So we brainstormed and came up with an idea he liked and then I Googled the shit out of theater makeup to pull it off. He went as a hell child risen from the dead (which was a bit of contrast to his two friends who went as Mario and Luigi).

Parenting is doing the work of raising a child.

Love is caring about their happiness, tending to it, nurturing it, because it is also truly yours.

So, Jen, by my earliest set of observations is good people.

Now, it is at this point where I need to confess to a personal failure here. An error that could have derailed this story before it ever got out of the station.

The first time I visited The Diner, as I set there trying to absorb the place, I lapsed into a set of presumptions I now know to be untrue. They were the product of my own experiences and the ways in which I, and we, as humans, “apperceive” the world around us.

We see what we expect to see.

Now, that’s a tremendously useful trait if you are, say, a caveman trying to avoid being eaten by whatever it was that sometimes ate cavemen. Being able to quickly deduce that a familiar shape in the dark is an eater of cavemen tends to be good for a caveman.

However, in small town diners, it tends to turn people who consider themselves worldly and intelligent into ignorant, presumptive asses.

The town where The Diner is located is only 40 miles away from my own yet, it couldn’t be more different. It is 10 times larger than my town geographically. It has one-quarter the population. It feels so very small. The offerings seem small. The opportunities seem small.

And it was with that as the backdrop that I sat during my first visit casually taking note of the person working front of house… the one who started working there, I suspect, right after high school… the one with a child but no ring. A young person who had never been to Vermont but was riding up with a friend that weekend to make a delivery and was ecstatic about it.

I entered with what now feels like an obnoxious presumption that there was some pitiable lack of opportunity at work here… I subconsciously presumed Jen was living this hardscrabble, blue collar, single-parent life because her environment - this little town with its thin population and people who never leave - just hadn’t exposed her to the vast, whirling world a mere gallon-and-a-half of gas to the east.

What I lack in rural profiling skills I make up for in attentiveness though.

I listen and watch and pay attention. I process a lot of cues. If there is a gift that comes with growing up with an alcoholic parent and having ADHD, it is likely just that: you process a lot of data in social settings which most people blissfully don’t. When you grow up having to read the room, you get good at reading rooms.

So, despite my embarrassing initial presumptions, I sat and listened and processed and took it all in.

Jen isn’t just a little exposure away from blowing out of town to live someplace with options and opportunities.

Every day last winter, no matter how cold, Jen walked out to the little hut back behind the house she lives in carrying a bucket of warm water. It was for her ducks and chickens. They’re high maintenance but generally get along fine with her dogs. All five of them. The Great Pyrenees may be the biggest but the Pomeranian is the loudest. They each keep general guard of the place and watch out for the horses.

When she isn’t working or with her son or taking care of her animals, at least one night a week, you can find Jen in the basement of a restaurant in town. They host a game night… or she does, really. She brings all the games and people get out of their houses and come and play.

One of the big draws is a wheel that attendees can spin to win the little prizes she has written into each little wedge. The kids love it. She lets them spin and then, as it slows toward stopping, she not-so-subtly stops it on “Free Dessert”. The kids’ eyes goes wide and she whispers “Shhh… This is our secret.” as the kids go running delightedly to tell their parents they won dessert.

I overheard Jen talking about Game Night with a customer.

“If I can make one kid happy, I’ve done a good job.” she said… and I thought that was sweet.

“You never know what kind of day they have had.” she added… and I thought that was beautiful.

I carted my own biases and baggage out to The Diner with me those first couple visits. That is a mistake I’m embarrassed by

Jen isn’t settling for a small town life that feels so constrained to me. She is choosing to work in a place where the owner is like family and the customers are familiar. She is choosing to live in a place where you can have chickens and ducks out back and maybe not make a ton but still have enough to buy a heated hose this year so they have warm water all winter and you don’t have to carry a bucket out there in the snow.

I like Jen.

I mean, who knows, maybe more exposure will somehow soil what I’ve seen and come to believe so far - but so far - I like the human being I have seen Jen to be.

The coffee place in my town had a Jen. She was a treasure. A bright and shining light serving a community of people who come and go seeming to not always notice. When that person leaves though… or is lost to cancer as my town’s Jen was… it is felt profoundly by all of the people who knew her and appreciated her and whose lives were bettered by having had them in it… even if that was for nothing more than a plate of eggs on occasion or a spin on a prize wheel when the adults weren’t looking.

This wasn’t the post I thought it would be. I’m glad that is the case. Jen deserved the ink.

The original topic will just have to go in the next installment.