I am grateful for family, friends, my faith community, food, shelter, health, and health insurance. In addition, I find it helpful to give thanks for specific smaller occasions, which brings me to the Waffle House.
I took my ten-year-old to this establishment a couple of days before the holiday at his request. His mom was out with his other siblings, so there was no one to veto the idea. We sat at the counter, and a waitress called both of us “Honey” when she took our orders — a waffle, naturally, for him with a side of bacon and an egg-sausage-and-cheese biscuit with hash browns for me. I let him pick among the hash brown topping options while I mentally ran through the list of nicknames for the restaurant that I’d heard over the years — Waho, Waffle Ho, Awful House, Waffle Spouse. He decided on “smothered” (sautéed onions).
A half-dozen orders were placed about the same time as ours, so we watched the lone cook fry bacon, scramble eggs, make waffles, and chop hash browns. Amid the flurry of steam and grease, pots and pans, he moved with calm mindfulness, like Goethe’s maxim, “Never hurry, never rest.” My son and I inspected the old-fashioned photos on the wall of the founders, Tom Forkner and Joe Rogers Sr., and the picture of Ms. Lily, who waited tables for 47 years—“That’s older than you, Dad.”
His food was placed in front of him with “Here you go, Honey,” and he inhaled the bacon. I gave him my sausage patty, which was vacuumed up as well. I shared a laugh with the waitress about how he’ll eat me out of my house and home. My son turned to his waffle but only after covering it with “whipped spread,” which he described as “like butter but with sugar.” His only disappointment was with the hashbrowns because they had too many onions. I explained that was what “smothered” meant. He nodded, “I’ll know better next time. There will be a next time, right, Dad?”
I smiled. Any restaurant that gets a big smile out of him gets a 5-star rating from me.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman is the author of the book with Wipf and Stock Publishers titled This Is the Day: A Year of Observing Unofficial Holidays about Ampersands, Bobbleheads, Buttons, Cousins, Hairball Awareness, Humbugs, Serendipity, Star Wars, Teenagers, Tenderness, Walking to School, Yo-Yos, and More. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where he is a student of joy.
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