We traveled south to north, noting that life had turned rough, bruised along the mighty Susquehanna. The river’s edge is rotten with bad times. A plethora of billboards advertise solutions to addiction and arrest. They sit on top of gloom and old flooding and now Harrisburg has declared bankruptcy. It looks the part with old drive in theaters, civil war era brick houses and fading white barns.
Suddenly, I am no longer ‘Yes, Ma’am, No Ma’am’. Where exactly did this happen? Over which brick in the road did we drive where the nuances of the polite south dissolved? How now, dear rustbelt. How heavily you have fallen.
Our waitress is cheerful. Her name is Cheyenne. We swallow a heavy meal of ham, potatoes, and choose from flaky pies as we sit on strong oak chairs and place silver on crisp linen cloths; our dining experience lingering in direct contrast to that of the road life outside.
My childhood nestles in the memory of pies and cobblers and rolls and butter and butter and butter and there will always be ham, somewhere served up with black coffee and I’m thinking about all those meals from long ago and then…there it is…that voice. The voice rising above restaurant chatter, informing trapped listeners what this individual has accomplished and what he said and how his circumstances were unique.
This voice lives in every restaurant I have ever entered. I hear it and I laugh out loud. I envision my father and my grandmother and I share this secret voice recognition with them; my family members who are suddenly and deeply abiding in the restaurant with him, with me. I see their faces in every lined and elderly white face surrounding me; eating food generations old and talking politely…back in the days, back in time when no mother would ever name her daughter Cheyenne and today, in this very present…in a place where I am no longer ‘Yes, Ma’am, No, Ma’am’ and the voice by the river drones on and on…
690 Saint Paul 