A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in a place called Old Country Kitchen outside of Wichita Heights. I don't mean to be disrespectful to any other restaurants, but the best all-you-can-eat buffets are the ones you find in the mid-west. Most of our people come from the red states.
I like to work backwards from the soft-serv machine. A long time ago when I worked in the drive-in back home I learned how to do it--the key is not having to turn the cone completely around, just swiveling it in a shallow figure eight so the vanilla or chocolate or strawberry forms a base to build on, keeping your other hand on the lever with the black ball on it to control the speed. There were a couple of kids watching the process, a boy of four or five, blond, with dark ringed eyes, eyebrows joined together in the center. His sister, a few years older, wearing school clothes and a white sweater, looked at me with suspicion as I handed over the piled-high cone.
"Is that okay with your mom?" I asked him, smiling at his mother, a pretty woman who was decorating a cup of yogurt with colored candy. Following her lead I filled up one of the small cups for myself. She liked the traditional pastel sugar sprinkles, whereas I was a little bit of a free spirit, scattering a scoop of brightly colored gummi bears across an alp of frozen vanilla. "Hey, do I know you from someplace? You look so familiar. Is your name by any chance Sharon?"
It turned out it wasn't what she was called, Jenny, believe it or not, but she was a quite a nice lady, pretty and self-assured mother of two, Rachel and Ben. I guess I've got an eye for ladies who are making it out on their own. Jenny had a friendly face, a dark brown head of hair, wore faded bluejeans over a pair of tan suede boots.
Sure, it was just a pickup line, but even without a snowball's chance we'd ever met, and even though things didn't ever go anywhere from there, it did seem like she was familiar, like someone I'd been friends with in the past, though I when I suggested Houston, where I work, she said she'd never been.
They want you to start with the cinnamon rolls. I like a couple of them, but not too many because you've got to save room for stuff like the fried chicken and the lasagna, which is also good. A cup or a bowl of chili makes a better hors d'oeuvre. Plus this place will give you a number and the guy with the chef's hat on will make you a burger and fries--while you wait, there's always plenty of turkey and roast beef coldcuts folded up. I always use both mayonaisse and mustard for my sandwich. I know that's a little weird, but you got two slices of bread, you might as well use them both.
Since it was nearly Thanksgiving I settled on turkey. Just kidding about the mustard, they had two kinds of cranberry sauce to mix with the mayo, crinkly dark green lettuce poking out from the edges. While I munched I looked out the window at the people moving back and forth freely through the mall.
Honestly, this is what it's all about. Right outside the restaurant a man was pushing an older lady in a wheelchair up the concrete handicapped entry ramp, his wife holding open the door. Out in the parking lot another family climbed down from a blue Ford Excursion and headed up a sidewalk toward the Cineplex, chattering happily.
"Ever been in the service?" I asked a fat man and woman who were sitting at the next table, tapping my finger on the newspaper I had picked up from the rack outside to show the guy what I was talking about. The headline read, "Bomb Blast kills 6 GIs in Bagdhad." I've never been to Iraq per se, though the company does have me traveling quite a bit. Back when I was in the Army there was talk that they might send us over to Bosnia, but that didn't happen either.
"Marines, yeah," the man said, still chewing on a plate of pork spareribs. People like me, and I can read them pretty good. I never have any trouble striking up a conversation. I guess that's part of why I'm in the job. He was about the same age as me, maybe a little older, big shoulders tight in a blue striped polo shirt. "Four year enlistment. Yeah. Getting tough over there."
"Yeah," I said, shaking my head sadly. "Kinda seems like things never really change, doesn't it? Is that strawberry pie any good?"
I looked back at the dessert island longingly, but Jenny and her two kids had finished their ice cream and were leaving the Old Country Kitchen into the other side of the parking lot. Oh, well. In my job you meet a lot of people. Most of them you meet once and then never see again.
At the movie theatre across the way they were playing "Capote" which was about the guy who wrote "In Cold Blood," the story how two robbers killed a whole family in the city of Holcomb, Kansas, back in the sixties. Then there was the case of Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer. He was from right there in Wichita. So I shouldn't have been surprised that the women around the place were a little skitzy.
"You know," I said, "Sometimes it seems as if it just isn't worth it, doesn't it? I mean, I see death, real human death and the human cost of it every day. Oh, I don't think I mentioned it, I'm from down in Houston, where I work for a company that does business supporting our troops in Iraq. Consoling widows is over-rated, I can tell you."
"No, not that company, though we do work very closely with Halliburton. They're one of our biggest clients. I'll tell you something else about that--we do good work, we don't overcharge anybody for anything. The feds wouldn't let us do it even if we wanted to. What do I do there? Well, you know, HR, Human Relations, I'm a contractor. Oh, OK, well, nice to meet you both..."
Fuck. So anyway, I just gave up and found my rental car and drove to the address on the sheet early.
[Part II, "Bereavement"]
I like to work backwards from the soft-serv machine. A long time ago when I worked in the drive-in back home I learned how to do it--the key is not having to turn the cone completely around, just swiveling it in a shallow figure eight so the vanilla or chocolate or strawberry forms a base to build on, keeping your other hand on the lever with the black ball on it to control the speed. There were a couple of kids watching the process, a boy of four or five, blond, with dark ringed eyes, eyebrows joined together in the center. His sister, a few years older, wearing school clothes and a white sweater, looked at me with suspicion as I handed over the piled-high cone.
"Is that okay with your mom?" I asked him, smiling at his mother, a pretty woman who was decorating a cup of yogurt with colored candy. Following her lead I filled up one of the small cups for myself. She liked the traditional pastel sugar sprinkles, whereas I was a little bit of a free spirit, scattering a scoop of brightly colored gummi bears across an alp of frozen vanilla. "Hey, do I know you from someplace? You look so familiar. Is your name by any chance Sharon?"
It turned out it wasn't what she was called, Jenny, believe it or not, but she was a quite a nice lady, pretty and self-assured mother of two, Rachel and Ben. I guess I've got an eye for ladies who are making it out on their own. Jenny had a friendly face, a dark brown head of hair, wore faded bluejeans over a pair of tan suede boots.
Sure, it was just a pickup line, but even without a snowball's chance we'd ever met, and even though things didn't ever go anywhere from there, it did seem like she was familiar, like someone I'd been friends with in the past, though I when I suggested Houston, where I work, she said she'd never been.
They want you to start with the cinnamon rolls. I like a couple of them, but not too many because you've got to save room for stuff like the fried chicken and the lasagna, which is also good. A cup or a bowl of chili makes a better hors d'oeuvre. Plus this place will give you a number and the guy with the chef's hat on will make you a burger and fries--while you wait, there's always plenty of turkey and roast beef coldcuts folded up. I always use both mayonaisse and mustard for my sandwich. I know that's a little weird, but you got two slices of bread, you might as well use them both.
Since it was nearly Thanksgiving I settled on turkey. Just kidding about the mustard, they had two kinds of cranberry sauce to mix with the mayo, crinkly dark green lettuce poking out from the edges. While I munched I looked out the window at the people moving back and forth freely through the mall.
Honestly, this is what it's all about. Right outside the restaurant a man was pushing an older lady in a wheelchair up the concrete handicapped entry ramp, his wife holding open the door. Out in the parking lot another family climbed down from a blue Ford Excursion and headed up a sidewalk toward the Cineplex, chattering happily.
"Ever been in the service?" I asked a fat man and woman who were sitting at the next table, tapping my finger on the newspaper I had picked up from the rack outside to show the guy what I was talking about. The headline read, "Bomb Blast kills 6 GIs in Bagdhad." I've never been to Iraq per se, though the company does have me traveling quite a bit. Back when I was in the Army there was talk that they might send us over to Bosnia, but that didn't happen either.
"Marines, yeah," the man said, still chewing on a plate of pork spareribs. People like me, and I can read them pretty good. I never have any trouble striking up a conversation. I guess that's part of why I'm in the job. He was about the same age as me, maybe a little older, big shoulders tight in a blue striped polo shirt. "Four year enlistment. Yeah. Getting tough over there."
"Yeah," I said, shaking my head sadly. "Kinda seems like things never really change, doesn't it? Is that strawberry pie any good?"
I looked back at the dessert island longingly, but Jenny and her two kids had finished their ice cream and were leaving the Old Country Kitchen into the other side of the parking lot. Oh, well. In my job you meet a lot of people. Most of them you meet once and then never see again.
At the movie theatre across the way they were playing "Capote" which was about the guy who wrote "In Cold Blood," the story how two robbers killed a whole family in the city of Holcomb, Kansas, back in the sixties. Then there was the case of Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer. He was from right there in Wichita. So I shouldn't have been surprised that the women around the place were a little skitzy.
"You know," I said, "Sometimes it seems as if it just isn't worth it, doesn't it? I mean, I see death, real human death and the human cost of it every day. Oh, I don't think I mentioned it, I'm from down in Houston, where I work for a company that does business supporting our troops in Iraq. Consoling widows is over-rated, I can tell you."
"No, not that company, though we do work very closely with Halliburton. They're one of our biggest clients. I'll tell you something else about that--we do good work, we don't overcharge anybody for anything. The feds wouldn't let us do it even if we wanted to. What do I do there? Well, you know, HR, Human Relations, I'm a contractor. Oh, OK, well, nice to meet you both..."
Fuck. So anyway, I just gave up and found my rental car and drove to the address on the sheet early.
[Part II, "Bereavement"]
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