Cold Weather and Warm Waitresses

The thermometer read five degrees below zero but the view beyond the deck railing where it hung was so bright with the sun glaring off the pristine snow that I was tempted to put on sunglasses just to look out the window. The sky was stone-washed denim blue, the pine trees standing as still as fence posts in an Andrew Wyeth painting. If I still owned a snowmobile suit I would have been tempted to go outside and make snow angels on the lawn, give the neighbors something to talk about on my sleepy cul-de-sac. Even with the proper outdoor gear and knowing the fridge weather was not people friendly, I probably would have nixed the idea. But I longed to go somewhere. It had been too long since I had a conversation that didn’t include the question, "Do you want a snowpea or a Milk-Bone?"

That was the day our monster storm was due to smack us full on the lips, but it wasn't due to hit until 4:00 and it was barely past noon when I slid into a booth at the Breakfast Only Café, so I wasn’t in a hurry. It was a good thing, too, because the waitress was slow in making her rounds which was easy to forgive considering she had fifteen tables full of people on her side of the place to wait on. If I’d been new to the business I would have thought someone didn’t show up for work on this bitter cold morning, but I knew better. Two waitresses is all they ever have on duty plus two cooks, a busy boy and a cashier. The latter has been known to help out by pouring coffee but she was nowhere in sight. Every time I go there I thank the powers that be for keeping me from ever working in the food industry. Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique did a good job indoctrinating me into believing that pouring coffee for bosses was the root of all workplace evil. I took it a step further in my mind to conclude that serving coffee to anyone was evil if I was the one doing it. Just call me Little Miss. Hospitality.

The waitress has been working at this café at least fifteen years and maybe for the local chain even longer. I used to know her cheating-x-husband-did-her-wrong backstory but I’ve forgotten the details. The owner has several places around town and decades ago we used to go to one on the other end of town. It was the only place around that was open all night and even though half the employees had prison tattoos we always felt safe there because the place was full of cops coming and going. It took the owner getting an award for his prison-out-reach program recently for me to have an 'ah ha moment' that explained why so many of his cooks and busboys sport facial tattoos. Anyway, one night my husband’s nephew was doing a ride-along with our snowplow crew and after finishing our work we were eating at the Breakfast Only Café when the nephew started bemoaning that fact that he couldn’t find a girlfriend.

“What about the waitress?" My husband asked. "She’s pretty nice. Cute too. Why don’t you ask her out?”

His nephew made a point of checking her out then replied, “Nah. Her ankles are too skinny.”

“Her ankles are too skinny? Are you serious?” It took a lot to shock my husband, but that comment did.

“Yes, I like girls with nice ankles.”

“No wonder you can’t find a girlfriend,” my husband shot back, “if you’re going to be that picky!” And for years to come that her-ankles-are-too-skinny line became a joke told every so often by our snowplowers when one of them would get caught checking out a waitress. Although I think ‘ankles’ morphed into a euphemism for ‘breasts’ after a while. It was a ‘70s when guys did things like that without being labeled sexist pigs like they would be today.

Speaking of dogs, Levi my Might Schnauzer has been driving me crazy with the bitter cold temperatures. He’ll beg to go outside then he wants to come right back in, before he’s had time to do his business. Then he’ll want to go out again after he’s had a minute or two to warm up because he still has to pee or poop. In and out, in and out. He’ll even beg at different doors because he thinks the weather might be more to his liking on the other side of the house. He does that in rainy weather too. But on the good side, he’s helping me make my Fitbit steps goal every day which I haven’t been doing since last summer. If you're wondering why I don’t just leave Levi outside until I’m sure he’s accomplished his mission to that I’d say, “I wouldn’t leave child outside in sub-zero temperatures as naked at the day he or she were born either. Why would I do it to the current love of my life?” He's also a nudist who refuses to wear a coat in case also you're wondering why he goes outside without one. It would take two men and a boy to wrestle him into one. © 

When the polar vortex comes to Michigan you might as well have fun with it like this school superintendent and principal did with announcing a school closing 1st and 2nd days. They can sing!

 

Doctors, Cheerleaders and Mechanics, Oh, My!

 

Thursday I had an appointment at the orthopedics center on the rich side of town where I’m guessing my bone doctor could walk to work from his gated community, if he was so inclined. I got there an hour early because I didn’t run into the road construction I expected along the way so I looked for a coffee shop near-by. In my part of the world Starbucks embeds mini coffee shops in grocery stores but in this rich man’s neighborhood I discovered their grocery store has a full service/maxi Starbucks with enough chairs to seat the entire Dallas Cowboys cheerleading squad plus an extra chair for each girl to park her pompoms. Why do they need 39 or 40 sets of boobs and butt cheeks jiggling on the field at half-time? I once watched an entire episode of their training camp reality TV show to find an answer to that and other burning questions but all I got was another question that begs an answer: How do they keep from getting their private parts chafed from all that jumping around in their skin tight short-shorts?

The rich man’s grocery store also had something I’ve never seen in a public place. A deluxe family bathroom with a urinal, regular toilet and a child sized toilet. With over twelve years of experience under my belt of seeking out family bathrooms for my wheelchair bound husband, I had never seen a child’s toilet in one---nor a urinal now that I think about it. I would have taken a picture but I thought I might feel like a tourist from Kick’s Ville if I did. The grocery store also had people who took their customers’ groceries out and loaded them in their cars. That was a flash-back to a by-gone era when they quit giving that service on my side of town and now I want to be rich. Is it too late in life for that to happen short of winning the Reader’s Digest Sweepstakes? All afternoon, I kept opening the front door hoping to see their camera crew parked on the street and them unloading a giant check made out to me. Life is so full of disappointments.

Wednesday I had an appointment to get my car’s 12,000 mile maintenance done where I learned that even with my hearing aids in the numbers 16 and 60 sound the same. In addition to the other stuff, I needed new windshield wiper blades and I was begrudging the fact that they’d “gone up” so much since I last bought a pair. Boy, did I feel silly when I told the cashier she made a mistake and undercharged me for the blades from what the (female) service manager told me they would cost. They had to call the service manager over where it was determined that my next service appointment should be at the hearing aid center.

The dealership where I take my car is in a small town near-by and it has more than their fair share of female employees working in traditionally male roles. And they’d hired a new one since my last visit---a certified mechanic so tiny she could have crawled in with the engine of my car, closed the hood and still have room left over to do pushups inside. A slight stretch of the truth, but you get the idea. She was petite like a Barbie Doll if Barbie Dolls worked on pink plastic cars. The waiting room has windows allowing customers to watch the mechanics at work and it crossed my mind that if their new mechanic wore a pair of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders’ shorts to go with her bouncy ponytail they could triple their business. (Hey, I wish I had thought to write that on a comment card.) Okay, that’s a sexist thing to say about her wearing shorts and not including the guy mechanics in on the new dress code suggestion but I’m old and I can be forgiven for poking fun.

In all seriousness, though, Betty Friedan would have been proud if she were alive and had been my side-kick at my Chevy dealership. And so am I. All that work we ladies of the Feminist Movement did in the `60s paid off for the current crop of young ladies. Girls get to be anything they want to be and as soon as my peer age group dies off there will be no one left to think it isn’t perfectly normal to have women (and men) let their talents and desire take them wherever and not be pigeon-holed by gender. Now, if we’d just break that glass ceiling in the White House before I die….. ©

Coming of Age versus the Coming of Wisdom

We are all visitors to this time, this place.
We are just passing through.

Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love

…and then we return home.

Australian Aboriginal Proverb

I went to bed last night on Saturday and woke up this morning on Friday. At least that was what my atomic clock said. Why do they do that to old people? Don’t they know we’re liable to believe that nonsense? After all, atomic clocks are supposed to be the most accurate time pieces on the face of the earth. They magically synchronize themselves each midnight from Boulder Colorado’s National Institute of Standards and Technology using mambo jumbo I couldn’t understand if I was younger and actually wanted to know how it works. All I know is someday that clock is going to be wrong again and I’m going to go some place I’d just been to a few days beforehand. And when I get there some bubble gum chewing receptionist is going to say, “poor woman is getting senile” because there is no way she’s going to believe my atomic clock actually told me it was yesterday instead of tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking of writing a blog about coming of age books written for adults, one of my favorite genres. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee, and Spencer’s Mountain by Earl Hamner Jr. all fall into this category of fiction. But this morning, having woke up on “yesterday” got to thinking there should be a term for what people go through late in life, a term to describe the kind of epiphany senior citizens have when we suddenly realize why we’ve been passing through this world---what it all means, and how we make peace with our past missteps and mistakes and inevitable demise. I suppose they call books like that autobiographies or non-fiction like Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom. To bad. I’d like to coin a new phrase like the coming of wisdom books.

I’ve always felt cheated because I don’t have a coming of age story to tell. There was no sudden transformation from childhood to adulthood for me, growing up the way I did in a 1940s and ‘50s household. It’s a stupid way to feel, of course, because in order to have a coming of age story I would have had to live through a trauma that took away my innocence or left me seeing an uglier side of life. Nope, I had a childhood where I came home from school to cookies and milk and parents who were determined my brother and I would have more opportunities in life than they had. My parents, if they had been inclined to write, could have told good coming of age stories. They both grew up dirt poor and without mothers in their lives. Actually, that fact had a big influence in how I was raised. Since my parents didn’t have mothers to model typical gender roles that were common back then they didn’t pass those values on to my brother and me.

It wasn’t until I transferred to a state school for my third year of college that I faced my first bias against women when my academic adviser wouldn’t approve my curriculum leading to a degree in architectural design. “Women only go to college to get an MRS degree,” he said. “You can’t take up a limited place in that program; that would deny the slot to a guy who needs to make a living.” Older and wiser now I realize I should have fought for myself back then, but I wasn’t a trail blazer. I didn’t like it but what could I do? At the end of that school year, I dropped out of college and didn’t go back to finish until twenty-five years later.

That was 1963 and that year at college planted the seeds of unfairness and when Betty Friedan’s classic book The Feminine Mystique came along later the same year those seeds grew. I became a card carrying member of NOW and all through the rest of ‘60s I could have been Exhibit A for work place unfairness. I was holding a job where I got paid half of what my male co-worker was getting because, as my boss put it, “He has a family to support.”

Since this is a blog about widowhood, I need to bring my late husband into this entry. He came into my life in 1970 and early on he actually read The Feminine Mystique at my request and more importantly when he started hiring women to work for him plowing snow he paid us the same as the guys. What’s not to love about an enlightened guy like that? God rest his soul. ©