Eating french toast alone at Mrs Rigby’s Diner a few mornings ago, I was thinking I should say hello to the old woman with a sad face. She’s often there, eating alone at the same time I’m eating alone, and there she was.
It was the perfect opportunity to strike up a conversation. We were in adjacent booths, sitting across two tables from each other, so we made accidental eye contact several times. I smiled at her twice, got one smile in return, but I didn’t say hello or anything, and neither did she.
Pushing 70, I’m still shy. Maybe I’ll get over it before I’m dead, but probably not.
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A man came in while I was chewing eggs. It’s a seat-yourself restaurant, but instead of sitting down he approached one of the waitresses and said, “Excuse me.”
“Hi,” she said. “You can sit anywhere.”
“Well, there’s a problem,” he said. “I can’t pay, but I’m expecting a check in the mail within the next few days. Would it be OK if I paid later?”
He was in his 40s, balding, skinny, not black but not quite white — maybe Mexican, maybe something else. He was asking Angela, a waitress who’s taken my order dozens of times, and she’s always nice. Being nice is her job, and she was nice to this guy. Without even a second of hesitation she said again, “You can sit anywhere, and pay when you can.”
A meal on credit, no questions asked. Apparently, I was eating breakfast inside an episode of The Waltons.
When Angela came to my table a little later, leaving the bill, I offered to pay for that guy’s breakfast. Said it quietly, so as not to embarrass him.
“Aw, that’s sweet of you,” she said, “but it’s not necessary. He’ll pay when he can.”
“Do you know him?”
“Well, I don’t ‘know’ him, any more than I know you, but he’s a regular. He’ll pay when he can.”
Saw a similar exchange once at Bob’s Diner in Madison, but it startled me then and it startles me now. This is America. You don’t expect kindness like that.
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Breakfast put me in a rare good mood, and I soon heard myself whistling “Singin’ in the Rain” as I was walking in the rain. Of course, the song is from the classic movie I’ve seen a dozen times.
Once, my wife & I took her parents to see it at Oakland’s Paramount Theater, a tremendous movie palace. Remembering that, I wondered if my own parents had seen the movie.
Dad’s dead, and Mom would’ve been in high school when it came out, so I asked her via text. “I’ve seen Singin’ in the Rain,” she replied, “but I don’t remember when or where. We did not go to movies when I was growing up. My father considered them evil.”
I can understand that. Mom’s father, my granddad, was a farmer and Christian minister, born in 1899, before movies were much of anything. If you didn’t grow up with it, sitting in a darkened room to watch images move like magic on a screen might seem radical and sinister. I feel the same about newfangled tech like social media, artificial intelligence, and smart phones.
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I meant it, by the way, when I said I’m itching to go to Minneapolis and get into some good trouble. So here’s my gofundme without gofundme:
Train fare would be about $500 round trip, and maybe another $500 for a cheap hotel and cheap meals and bus fare over the 3-4 days I’d spend there. Maybe less, especially if a kind stranger could room-and-board me in their basement or garage.
So it’s a thousand-dollar daydream, and I can afford about half that.
What would a donor get from the deal? Well, I’d say please and thank you, and mean it. I’d have something interesting to write about, so you’d get a few pages of blogging better than this one, assuming ICE doesn’t shoot me through the head. If I’m staying in your basement, I pledge up to an hour of conversation, and to not leave a mess. And did I mention I’d say thanks?
End of the page, end of the beg.
1/28/2026
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