The Waitress On Roller Skates

It’s Saturday, and I walk in the door of the Sap Bush Cafe — the little open-one-day-a-week place run by my farmer friends who are my Family of Choice. Quick hugs to my nieces-by-affection, Saoirse and Ula, and a chat with their mother Shannon. I do some energy healing on her before she heads for the stove and griddle.

Ula, I see, is wearing her trademark roller skates.

It’s very busy this morning. Shannon and her husband Bob weave and dance in the kitchen, demonstrating their farm-to-table mastery. The girls are in the front of the house.

Saoirse is the barista magnifica, whipping out lattes and coffee and FizzBuzzes (the house special) with calm aplomb.

And Ula — she of the roller-skate ballet — glides back and forth between the customers, delicately clomping on the rubber matting behind the counter to grab a croissant for a customer and cash someone out. She hoists three plates of breakfast, smoothly sailing between tables and hip-checking the front door open to serve the patio groups.

I watch the normalcy. I revel in it.

Still, I compare it with the constant screaming of “We’re in an Extinction Event, look at the droughts, the crop failures, the drying rivers (which also by the way means we will not have any electricity), and within fifteen years we will all be in a pre-industrial-level panic of scarcity, which is when Authoritarianism is going to have a permanent iron grip on the entire world and we will all be in perpetual war” from so many writers.

They crash together, dissonant, each demanding my complete attention.

As I sip my coffee and wait for my “Corbie eggs and double-dead bacon” (my usual order of scrambled eggs with cheese and bacon that doesn’t flop hello when you pick it up), I think about the four-day vacation in Virginia Beach Carle and I are planning for our twentieth anniversary.

Part of me believes it will be the last “normal” vacation we will ever have — whether for reasons of money, world chaos or the feeling of “how can I let myself relax when everything is teetering toward the Dark Times.”

But if that is the case, I am greedy enough to want one more untrammeled night in a beachfront hotel…one more hand-holding walk along a boardwalk and down a sandy beach…one more anniversary dinner with damn-the-torpedo costs and dressed up fancy, sitting across from the man I’ve been in love with for decades.

Breakfast arrives. Savory, simple, not-too-much-but-just-enough. The first forkful and I relax. Good food. Friends. A quiet buzz of conversation. Healing energy right there.

Then, however, a mistake: opening my browser, checking my emails and reading the news and my social media feeds, I despair at the constant battle between left and right, progressive v. liberal v. moderate v. conservative v. MAGA, all with their own truths that they refuse to moderate and cannot even get a toehold on the other groups to consider — to the point that communication is positively Orwellian worldwide.

I wonder how the country I live in lost any sense of kindness, of justice, of compassion, of trust of your neighbor, of trust in what you hear or see from anyone that isn’t lock-step in your braingroove.

I close the phone and finish breakfast, remembering to save a few bites of bacon and egg for Doodles, the Sap Bush family’s tinydog. She patiently waits by my chair every Saturday morning, knowing that I am a Soft Touch when it comes to furry fourleggers with big eyes and a hopeful demeanor.

Looking around, I acknowledge I might have jumped to help change things when I was younger by a decade or two or three or four — but now, I feel drained every other day just by life.

When I get deeply philosophical, the exhaustion of life becomes evident. And when I have not even the faintest idea of how to combat or mitigate any of it…yet I am still supposed to be a beacon of hope and positivity and sensible thought for clients…

Man, that’s really, really hard.

Can’t quit, though. It’s what I’m here for.

For as long as I’m here, I’ll hug people and heal people and feed hopeful dogs and love my husband. I’ll help as I can, and keep safe what I can, and never ever take for granted even the smallest crumb of kindness, of safety, of peace, of compassion.

I acknowledge that life will never be what it used to be or what I expected my senior years to hold.

And all the Doomscreamers may be completely on target with how hellish the future will be until all of us are dead in the radioactive ashes and starvation and climate-chaos-caused deserts.

But if that is the future, I will not hold in contempt these last few days (or weeks or months or years) of good moments because of the guilt that I cannot fix everything.

And I will never pass up the chance to give a fly-by hug to the waitress on roller skates.