We were supposed to have prime rib for Christmas dinner, but instead we went to Waffle House. It was one of a series of holiday surprises - like our first flight from Vermont to North Carolina getting canceled, our second and third flights getting canceled (but not till we'd made it to JFK), and then learning that the next available flights to Raleigh would not depart till after the holiday.
One very expensive "economy" car rental and 30 hours later, we managed to crunch/slide/will our way up the un-plowed mountain road to our cabin in the woods. The sun was just starting to glow from behind the mountains, and my family awoke to meet us. It was almost like a Folgers commercial except that we went immediately to bed, and when we woke up there was much better coffee.
It was a wonderful week of playing in snow with my five-year-old nephew, sitting in the hot tub watching the waterfall, and playing board games with my fantastically wacky family. Then on Christmas morning we all awoke to find that... the power was out! Although Santa had visited us and left plenty of presents, he did not find it necessary to leave us a generator or any means for cooking, flushing the toilet, or otherwise maintaining civil society.
We hit the road. And about a half hour down the mountain, we understood the reason for the outage. For about a hundred miles of our drive, everything was encased in ice. The trees - bent over tapping at each-other, collapsed into the snow, or splintered into a thousand pieces across the road, and power lines of course - drooping and swaying with the weight of the frozen rain. It was a scary, but magical ride.
And that's how, three hours later, we ended up at the Waffle House outside of Greensboro. If you've never been, then imagine a Denny's - but more casual. We had to split up into groups as the House was apparently quite popular on Christmas Eve. Not with Jewish waffle-lovers as you might think, but with teenagers who'd just escaped from familial festivities, weary travelers like us, and even a few families wearing their finest, obviously out for their traditional and much anticipated Waffle House dinner.
Our waitress couldn't have been more than 19, but she yelled our orders for waffles, hamburgers, and hashbrowns out with the authority of a thirty-year-old. She made sure my nephew got his waffle within five minutes of sitting down, entertained his requests for ice in his water and ketchup for his waffle "when I was a kid, all I ate was ketchup, just straight out of the bottle, and I turned out fine," and chatted with us about children - she had 2 of her own. She didn't seem bothered to be working on Christmas, or the fact that she was just starting her life, had two kids, and a job at the Waffle House.
She just did her job, and did it very well. I imagined her going home late that night (she told us she was on till 3 a.m.), checking on her sleeping babies, counting her tip money out and placing it carefully in a jar. Then she would clean up the dinner dishes, perhaps do some laundry, slide into bed for a few hours and wake up the next day to do it all over again. It sounds kind of depressing as I write it all out, but she had one of the nicest smiles you've ever seen.
Here's my holiday wish: that our Waffle House waitress gets everything she hopes for. And as for me: I hope that in the coming year I can be more like her. Taking what life gives me and making the best out of it. Doing my job well, listening to the stories of the people I meet, taking care of my family, and loving that I get another day to do it all.
