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Email From NOLA IIw
As you may or may not be aware, Wednesday is biscuits and gravy day at the diner in Little Washington.
This morning the long central table was occupied by a woman's group exchanging Christmas presents.
I'm sitting alone at a table for four, facing the door, and an old local curmudgeon comes in and sits at another table for four, facing me. He glances at the table full of women and the beginning of a rueful smile comes across his face. He is midway through the complete facial machinations of the rueful smile when he makes eye contact with me, watching him watching them. With our hearts melting a little we extend to each other the old curmudgeon's nod, and I throw in an abbreviated rueful smile while he completes his.
Me and him only have them for entertainment and so we watch as they exchange gifts and open them for our pleasure. Christmas ornaments and other decorations, a sweater, some wine, some chocolate, and a dish towel is what I saw exchanged between the ten or twelve perhaps office workers.
I let my one eye go cocked and so have no exact vision but more just a sense of things, the pitch of voices, the movement of diners. I refocus for a moment and the old curmudgeon across from me is also refocusing from his own squiggy-eyed state. Both of us out of our altered states we make indirect eye contact and he's thinking of a thing that is not actually a single thing but a pure emotion based on a bunch of things from the giant pile of emotional rubble that makes up his life. Me and him are synching now and we both know it. Looks like he may have gotten a little hot sauce in his eye because I cannot think of any other reason why his eyes, which began clear, are now just slightly red around the edges, and glazed with a film of water.
I make the hasty decision not to hang around this girly-fest a moment longer. I get up hurriedly and pay my bill and then my respects to the two waitresses, and walk out into the wintery chill of a rural Virginia postcard.