Musings from Brian J. Noggle: Lessons from the Diner

Lessons from the Diner

No, not that Diner.

Every Sunday, I take my sainted mother out to breakfast. Well, perhaps "take" is the wrong word, since she usually drives us there in that new little roller skate of hers (I, of course, encouraged her to invest in a car I'd want to inherit, years hence, with low mileage) and she mostly pays for breakfast. So every Sunday, I go with (or perhaps sponge off) my sainted mother to a small diner in historic (if you count the outlot of a new strip mall as "historic," but someday, it will be, when we're all living in underground catacombs or in orbit, how we'll long for strip malls) Oakville, Missouri, for breakfast.

But I digress. Over the course of my many ~~hundreds of~~ ~~dozens of~~ trips to that diner, I've learned valuable life lessons that have made me a better man, husband, and father. To whit:

Spread your jelly thin, for there's only one little tub of it and four halves of cold buttered toast across which you'll want to stretch your limited supply.
Don't drink all the coffee in the cup, you greedy bastard. Because you probably don't want to know the real reason why that water is brown--it has something to hide.
Damn the masculinity, order the strawberries and whip cream on your waffle; for in thirty minutes, these strangers will have forgotten how nancy you looked, and you'll have the satisfaction of the sweetness in your belly. Assuming, of course, you don't finish the coffee and see what's at the bottom of your coffee cup.
You'll never be Norm-al. By the time the regular waitresses remember what you want even though you order the same freakin' thing every freakin' Sunday, the regular waitresses will have real jobs, and you'll have to start breaking in a new set of regular waitresses. So don't expect them to just bring the coffee when you sit down, much less learn your name.

Well, I just have the ill luck to have been born in relatively stable years with great opulence. Some generations get real-life lessons from wars and depressions and real adversity, I get red pepper nuggets in my coffee.

And, sonny, when I was young, we liked it that way.

- posted by Brian J. @ 7:27 PM