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March 06, 2005

a weakness for waitresses

Yesterday two young men sat down in a restaraunt. I never did learn their business. They seemed college aged; perhaps they were some committee for a fraternity. I seldom could hear the words of the older, white man as he slouched against the wall. He was tall, but with a softening physique, as if he had begun to abandon the fiery contests of his youth. His eyes and his low voice conveyed an alert competency as he scanned the room.

The younger black man I could not fail to hear. His hoarse voice was the final, eloquent touch on a portrait of the consumate athelete. He was bald, shorter and more muscled than his friend; perhaps he was a football player. He conversed leaning over his paper placemat, forearms pressed forward against the table in the form of a greco-roman wrestler.

Our waitress arrived at their table. She was thin, with a fragile slavic face, like an eastern European immigrant. She had no accent when she spoke. The white man kept his voice low, returning her salutation in a measured, pleasant tone. But the wrestler became the politician, straightening up and leaning back. "Do I know you? You seem familiar somehow," he said to the waitress.

"Oh," she said, somewhat nonplussed. "I'm sorry." She worried for her tip.

"No," he rasped, his voice growing only louder, "You see, that's actually a good thing."

"Ok," she draped her inflection across the quizzical smile growing at the corner of her mouth, as if a question were about to follow. "Do you know what you want to drink?" She pulled out her tablet.

"We'll have coffee," the wrestler affirmed. "He'll have coffee too," he said, gesturing back and forth across the table at his companion. The white man and the waitress glanced at each other, and the white man nodded.

When they ordered their food, the wrestler and the waitress went on together for some time about the details of his meal. "Can I have the omelet, but with hash browns, and maybe a couple of patties of sausage, but no pancakes?"

"Well," she explained, "it comes with hash browns, and with either pancakes or toast."

"So I can't just make a substitution, pancakes for sausage?" he asked.

"No, I'm sorry." her voice was sympathetic, as if he were stranded with a dead car battery and asking to borrow jumper cables. "I can bring you the omelet, and the hash browns," she offered, "and just leave off the pancakes if you want."

He hmmmed for a moment, looking back at his menu. "Alright," he said, decisive again. "Do that, but bring me some sausage too. I don't care what it costs." He spoke with the resolve of a hard-headed movie producer working on his oeuvre, who had just been warned that cost overruns could liquidate all his fortunes.

The waitress carried herself away in the weary, yet resolute posture of a pretty woman long accustomed to serving food to common men. The wrestler, back in his customary pose, craned his neck around to watch her go.

The two men returned to their conversation. The wrestler told, in rueful expression, the story of his weekend drinking binge. My son offered me most of the whipped cream on his hot chocolate. I put it in my recently refilled coffee.

Eventually the waitress came back to the Greeks. She leaned sideways, a large oval tray on her left shoulder casting her frame into the classical posture of the dairy maiden or farm girl. She began setting plates down with quick, steady movements. "Does everything look ok?" she asked as she served the food. I'll never know if the white man made any reply one way or the other.

"Oh!" said the wrestler loudly, "Oh my!" He leaned back in his chair, rubbing his belly in anticipation. "This is incredible! Ooooooo!" he watched her set down the plate of sausage patties, sucking his breath through his teeth, and shaking his head from side to side. "And I'm soooo hungry!"

It was unreserved, unstinting appreciation for a meal of outsized proportions, prepared and served in quiet, friendly efficiency. Suddenly I was transported, in my imagination, to the wrestler's mother's kitchen, for I knew that here was a man who had been loved through the preparation of home cooked food, and who had a sense of the worth of such love.

The wrestler grew philisophical as they ate. "The main thing," he said at length, "is to be happy." The white man murmered something back over his fritata. "I see so many people," the wrestler continued, "running around trying to get ready to be happy someday, and I just want to say, 'Hey! Be happy now!'" He forked at his omelet. "To be happy, that's what it's all about," he concluded. There was a pause as he chewed thoughtfully. "And to make other people happy," he added, as an afterthought.

I thought happily to myself that the most beautiful things in this world are mighty strengths wrapped, encumbered, and confounded by overwhelming weakness. Our frailty covers us like a burial shroud and yet we live. This was not lost on the Creator, who, when he came to talk to the wrestlers, waitresses and white men of this world, "did not count it robbery to be equal with God," but cast his frame in the form of a servant, leaned sideways beneath a cross, and set his life down for his friends. His weakness is for us.

Posted by joel at March 6, 2005 10:46 AM

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