I Smell Winter on Her Breath
(Inspired by a song from The Housemartins)
I sat with Dan everyday when we both got home from work. At the time I worked at lunch diner/cafe with some early morning coffee and bagels; Dan worked at a machine shop. His pay was a whole ton more than mine, but his work was really far less interesting. What, you ask? Less interesting than a dinner? Stop right there. I’ll tell you what – restaurant work is about people and that, in all my years, was never dull. There are customers – sure pains in the butt most of time but they paid my bills and there WERE some great, great people I met in restaurants. The staff, though, that’s where things got super interesting.
Dan spent 85% of his day working with machine and not interacting at all. Once in awhile, when a part changed there would have to be some testing and quality control things to work out, he would but mostly it was the same repetitive isolating work. So he started the table talk as a way to get back his social skills.. I would come home from my day shift at the diner and he’d ask about the people.
Since the shack had odd restaurant hours many of the folks had other server work. We opened at 6 but only had coffee and bagels. The soup and sandwiches and snacks were served from 11 to 3. We did good business. Four hours of rush. Almost all table service and tips fairly good. It was a good deal. Not a lot of time to get to know the main business lunchers, but a good traffic in the ladies who lunch.
I had ongoing stories about the cowboy, the biker chick, the Mexican, the Guatemalans, and Fat Earl. Fat Earl was the most interesting. He had a regular girl he liked to see in the evenings – usually just once a week. And then he’d spend the rest of the week telling anyone, including us women, about his progress. We all wondered to each other if she – Tracey -- really existed, or whether it was the “telling” of it to us that really got him off. No one at the restaurant had ever seen Tracey and he only ever talked about her in date mode – never something like, “Tracey’s a teacher and she ….. “ No, it was always stuff like, “She showed up wearing a red dress….”
One day three months ago, all of us had to stop and scratch our heads. He said, when he came in, that when he went to kiss her last night, he had to stop. He smelled winter on her breath and he had to get his bearings. It was June and winter is either a long time ago or still a far way away.
Dan and I worked out a theory. And to this day no one can prove otherwise. This was the deal. Fat Earl wasn’t always fat. When he was 21 he left a Montana farm and went to work oil or fish in Alaska. He realized, accidentally, that the more weight he had on the less cold he was. The winters where he was – Nome, Fairbanks, Cold Harbor, were brutal. Out on the boats he say guys with hands so cold they just fell off. No and Alaska summer may not be as warm as you and I are used to but it was better than that miserable season for Earl. So when he smelled winter on his breath, what he was telling us was that things would or were about to get really uncomfortable with he and Tracey.
(Inspired by a song from The Housemartins)
I sat with Dan everyday when we both got home from work. At the time I worked at lunch diner/cafe with some early morning coffee and bagels; Dan worked at a machine shop. His pay was a whole ton more than mine, but his work was really far less interesting. What, you ask? Less interesting than a dinner? Stop right there. I’ll tell you what – restaurant work is about people and that, in all my years, was never dull. There are customers – sure pains in the butt most of time but they paid my bills and there WERE some great, great people I met in restaurants. The staff, though, that’s where things got super interesting.
Dan spent 85% of his day working with machine and not interacting at all. Once in awhile, when a part changed there would have to be some testing and quality control things to work out, he would but mostly it was the same repetitive isolating work. So he started the table talk as a way to get back his social skills.. I would come home from my day shift at the diner and he’d ask about the people.
Since the shack had odd restaurant hours many of the folks had other server work. We opened at 6 but only had coffee and bagels. The soup and sandwiches and snacks were served from 11 to 3. We did good business. Four hours of rush. Almost all table service and tips fairly good. It was a good deal. Not a lot of time to get to know the main business lunchers, but a good traffic in the ladies who lunch.
I had ongoing stories about the cowboy, the biker chick, the Mexican, the Guatemalans, and Fat Earl. Fat Earl was the most interesting. He had a regular girl he liked to see in the evenings – usually just once a week. And then he’d spend the rest of the week telling anyone, including us women, about his progress. We all wondered to each other if she – Tracey -- really existed, or whether it was the “telling” of it to us that really got him off. No one at the restaurant had ever seen Tracey and he only ever talked about her in date mode – never something like, “Tracey’s a teacher and she ….. “ No, it was always stuff like, “She showed up wearing a red dress….”
One day three months ago, all of us had to stop and scratch our heads. He said, when he came in, that when he went to kiss her last night, he had to stop. He smelled winter on her breath and he had to get his bearings. It was June and winter is either a long time ago or still a far way away.
Dan and I worked out a theory. And to this day no one can prove otherwise. This was the deal. Fat Earl wasn’t always fat. When he was 21 he left a Montana farm and went to work oil or fish in Alaska. He realized, accidentally, that the more weight he had on the less cold he was. The winters where he was – Nome, Fairbanks, Cold Harbor, were brutal. Out on the boats he say guys with hands so cold they just fell off. No and Alaska summer may not be as warm as you and I are used to but it was better than that miserable season for Earl. So when he smelled winter on his breath, what he was telling us was that things would or were about to get really uncomfortable with he and Tracey.