This morning our electricity was out, due to a storm that knocked a power line down about a mile away from our house. It was not too bad getting ready by candlelight. Although I am sure I look a little scary sans make-up, but at 50, I don’t really care about that anyway.
My husband, between sneezes, offered to buy me breakfast on the way to work, which I accepted quickly as this is indeed unusual.
We stopped in at a local breakfast diner, and the waitress quickly approached. She was at least 60, but could have passed for 70. She weighed about 90lbs, but had the upright breasts of a 20 year old. Her face looked like a road map of all the places she might have been during her life, and her hair was unnaturally dark.
She affected me, perhaps because I waitressed for 12 long years (as my second job) at a Catfish Restaurant in a ‘slightly hick’ town (which I affectionately referred to as the Tobacco Dipping Capital of the World).
I would spend my daylight hours in the company of white-collar America, with business suits and women wearing Clinique make-up. But nights and weekends, I joined the blue-collar world, where having a job and making rent on your trailer made you a pretty darn wealthy citizen. It was a huge life-lesson for me back in those days. I stopped taking so much for granted, and I also started saving for all the dental work I needed to get done. And now, back at the restaurant, I watched this woman, and I felt sad because I could tell she had lived such a hard life. I wondered about who she was, what was her story? I thought about how so many other women her age get to live such different lives to hers.
Other women her age probably get their hair & nails fixed every week, shop at Target, or if they are financially better-off, Macy’s. This poor woman obviously works the graveyard shift at a diner where a $2.oo tip will get you remembered as a star.
I left her $4.00, and stepped back into my comfortable world. A world where I didn’t have to work as hard as the waitress, and a world in which I did not have her perky breasts……. Wait….maybe her tips are better than I realized…….. Jude