Take that, Hawk!

By T.W. Burger

Breakfast this morning reminded me forcefully of what I love about small-town, mom-and-pop diners.

You can get an acceptable breakfast in all sorts of places, sometime even those franchise outfits with their written policies and corkboards with pronouncements from the HR office at HQ thumbtacked thereon.

But that’s not here. I have never been in the kitchen, so maybe this place actually has a bulletin board, but you catch my drift. This is the kind of place where you can ask for sauteed scallops with your pancakes. I did that once – not here, but a place like it – and got just that.

The morning weekday crowd at my favorite diner is relaxed. Most of the guests have become happily superannuated to the point of being in a good mood during breakfast with friends. In my own little group of ROMEOS (Retire Old Men Eating Out,) we wander from topic to topic; politics, sometimes sports, ways we embarrassed ourselves as children, ways we have embarrassed ourselves as adults, (a much longer list) things we have done for a living, all the things we did that didn’t quite pay a living but we did them anyway, kids, grandkids, wives, ex-wives, pets and vehicles.

And doctors and everything attached to them. As the years go by, they butt into the conversation more often.

My friend John and I started this group long ago, looking for a place where we could get grits for breakfast. Where I live now, it’s hard to find. I was raised in the Deep South, and I miss it. John spent time down there in the Navy, and he does, too. And then another friend, Sal, joined us, and then Dick, and pretty soon we had an organization.

But it’s a human organization, running on human clocks. Sal and Dick are gone; clocks and doctors again. I missed a couple of months. Same thing. Another friend and his wife are recovering from a house fire, more clocks, different docs. They are always on our minds, but we’re guys of a certain age, so we don’t talk a lot about it all the time.

It all sounds morose. It isn’t.

When I was a younger man, a popular graphic made its way around the t-shirts and greeting cards: A hawk stooped out of the sky, all claws and sharp beak, toward an obviously doomed mouse.

The mouse stood, terrified, shaking, ears drooping.

But its right arm rose stiffly, giving the traditional one-fingered salute.

Just before we adjourned, our server passed our table bearing a truly gigantic treat. It was an enormous Belgian waffle, liberally festooned with whipped cream and orbited by large red berries.

It seemed to me that the room grew still, every eye tracking the International Space Station-sized goodie to the table next to ROMEO’s HQ.

“My God, what an awful waffle,” I said in my best faux horror. 

In a twinkling, John held his plate out, grinning.

Another elderly man from another table near the dessert sprang into action, standing readily near the dessert, fork at the ready. The woman who had ordered this delight surrounded it with her arms and pretended to be alarmed: “No!” she cried.

And then that whole end of the diner exploded with people laughing, joking and talking all at once.

We adjourned until the next week’s meeting and variously walked and limped to the parking lot.

Take that, hawk!

T. W. Burger was raised in town and graduated from Athens High School in 1967, then worked as a driver of everything from fork trucks to garbage trucks,

He is now a semi-retired journalist who resides on the banks of Marsh Creek, just outside of Gettysburg, Pa.