Thinking about that woman in Kentucky

The Column: 03.03.23

I was down in Frankfort, Kentucky, last week and sat in a café one morning and a fortyish woman in a white uniform approached and said, “What can I get you, Hon?” and I, being a Northerner, was rather touched because female food service workers up North don’t go around Honning male customers. I’ve been Deared a few times but only by women older than I and they may have Deared me from dementia. Once a waitperson in Minneapolis Friended me and I almost spilled my coffee.

(Notice that I don’t refer to them as a “waitress.” The “-ess” is a diminutive, it’s a patronizing relic of male dominance; she is a Waitperson, even though that term could be mistaken as “Weight Person,” meaning “fat lady.” Anyway, female service personnel in Minnesota do not address a man as “hon” or any other term of affection and if he addressed her as Hon, he could be arrested, handcuffed, and taken downtown.

I’m fine with that. We live in a changing world and I try to go with the flow. But I can admit to you, dear reader — may I call you “dear,” sweetheart? — that “Hon” touched me and I also admit that I overtipped her, and the Honning was a factor in that. It made me feel like it was 1958 again and Jerry Lee Lewis was on TV playing stand-up piano on “Great Balls of Fire,” back when rock ’n’ roll was more fun, before it was taken over by alienated loners.

I ordered biscuits and gravy for breakfast, Southern food, I wanted to fit in. I didn’t want other patrons to look at me and see my bowl of artisanal granola and think, “That man wants to confiscate our guns and teach our grandchildren about transgentrification.”

The woman came by a little later and said, “How’s your breakfast, dear?” I said, “It’s wonderful,” though actually it was rather mediocre, but I didn’t want to cause her anxiety because — this is going to sound pathetic but forgive me — her “hon” had given me a very warm feeling deep inside. Me, a published author who once got a terrific review in the Times and who’s attended luncheons at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but neither the Times nor the Academicians ever called me “hon” and she did and it means something to me.

I am a privileged white Anglo male — privileged in that my parents loved each other and didn’t drink and I got a decent basic education in the public schools and I grew up fundamentalist, which once you’re done with it, life gets much easier, and attended a land-grant university back when you could pay your tuition with a part-time job and I got into radio by virtue of the fact that I was the only applicant for the job — and the woman who waited on me probably didn’t have those advantages.

Maybe the “Hon” was an appeal for kindness by a woman who’d suffered indignities and felt exploited and trodden upon. Maybe she hates her job. Maybe her younger no-good brother got to go to college and she didn’t. She’s smarter than he is by a long shot and look how he messed up his life. As it says in Ecclesiastes, “The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, but time and chance happeneth to them all.” In other words, we’re not so different from the mouse who scurries through the underbrush only to feel the claws around his neck and hear enormous wings flap and suddenly he’s fifty feet in the air being delivered to the eagle’s kiddos.

But I’m not looking over my shoulder. I am pledged to cheerfulness. I was supposed to die twenty years ago but surgeons got to work and my sentence was commuted and I am very grateful. You would be too, buttercup.

One beautiful thing about getting old is the irrelevance. It’s a troubled world and my importance in it is very slight, not like when I was young and the center of the solar system, and now I enjoy the world more than ever, including biscuits and gravy in Kentucky, home of Mitch McConnell (“Be good, Mitch baby. Lighten up, kiddo.”), and I advise you to live longer. Smile at the woman who serves you breakfast and don’t order biscuits and gravy. Bran flakes with berries is much better for you.

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