out, damned waitress…

I ate at the Pancake Circus in Sacramento last week. When my waitress brought me water, I had a total Christopher Walken/Dead Zone moment. It was like I got such a blast of something from this waitress that I have been sort of preoccupied since then. I am hoping that if I just spit it out, I can just go on. To wit:

I love my wife. She’s caring and fun. The small things that usually bother other people just glide right by her.

She has been working at the Pancake Circus on Broadway for about 7 years. She works the graveyard shift, but doesn’t mind it. We’re both night owls and always have been. She has plenty of regular customers. Some nights she says that it hardly feels like work. Hardly, that is, until her ‘dogs start bark- ing.’

Last year she took a long vacation (we took a bus to see her daughter in Bozeman.) Her customers were apparently up in arms. She spoils them, I think. Once she notices which sort of preserve is to someone’s liking, she spreads it for them without fail. When she hands a man his water and coffee, it’s right beside his favorite newspaper sections. I don’t personally like that sort of treatment very much. I enjoy mixing things up occasionally. I may feel like butter one day, marmalade the next. I’ve always found it best to serve myself.

I send her off to work most nights with a breakfast of her own. I make her oatmeal just how she likes it. I try to rotate the juice so that she never knows which it’s going to be. I put her favorite music on the cassette radio we keep over the ironing board. She’s partial to Sinatra, which I can’t stand. I have always been a Chet Atkins man. It’s her meal though, and I like to make it comfortable.

She heads off for the bus and I get ready for turning in. Lately I only need about five hours of sleep at night. I close things down once she’s gone and wake with the schoolyard sprinklers across the street. I lie there and listen to them for a bit while I try to reflect upon the night’s dream.

I have had the same dream at least 3 nights a week for the last month or so. In the dream, I am young again. I am in the house of my first marriage (Gladys and I were both widowed when we met.) My first wife is there with me and we are silent. The silence is strange to me since we generally were singing. My first wife and I had a musical act that we would perform on the weekends in the local roadhouses. We were called ‘Kitch & Sink' and we’d play pert’ near any song that any fool called out from the charts of the day. In the dream though, we are silent.

I rise slowly from the bed and start in with the morning ritual. Just about the time that the teachers and students begin arriving at the school, I head for the kitchen to prepare dinner for my Gladys. She’s a hard worker and I like to show her that I notice. On a good morning, I’ll grab a flower or two from the yard. Other days, I just go with an extra hug and peck on the forehead. She never really has much to say about work as it hardly ever surprises. She always has a kind thing to say about the meal, although it’s usually nothing special.

I love my wife.