Never fails. I get near a small town, and like a kid, my head does a double left-right dance, my eyes bounce up and down and all around, reading each and every sign within sight. Barely missing a pedestrian, I hit the brakes. No, I’m not experiencing mid-life Attention Deficit Disorder, I’m searching for counters. Cafe counters. Counters with character and bolted-down stools behind doors and windows plastered with handmade posters: “WANTED: One good Dog-rarin’ to hunt, but too lazy to bite.” “Kramer’s Auction Service: 75 Head of High Grade Holstein Dairy Cattle for Sale.” Or “Vote for my dad. If he could cut my mom’s budget, then he’ll do wonders with the state’s.”
Forget those franchise imitations with potted palms, done in primary colors with chrome and glass posters of James Dean and Marilyn Monroe. I want counters way behind the times. And then some. Give me unfashionably faded Formica with glass bottles of catsup, pots of mustard and honey bears battling for space with mismatched salt and pepper shakers, ashtrays and napkin holders, all lined up like the cavalry above a less-than-squeaky-clean floor of blues and grays. Counters where a waitress with a pencil poked in her beehive hairdo hums or mumbles to herself and fizzes me up a cherry-chocolate Coke, light on the cherry, please, then dishes up a chipped blue-plate special heaped high with something most rug rats nowadays have never even tasted-real peeled, boiled and mashed-in-milk-and-butter-potatoes.
“Anything else, Honey?” she asks with a lopsided grin. Her size 8s may be killing her, but she serves up one more smile with the last piece of pecan pie. The twinkle comes from the heart. I can tell. She’ll get 20 percent from me, at least. But she really deserves a foot rub.
Just like that waitress, these counters, with upside-down mugs parked in front of stools like mini-fireplugs, are hard to find in an age of drive-up, gulp-it-down-on-the-run lifestyles. Following a pace as natural as sunrises, fishermen and farmers flock to country counters every morning-often beating the sun-plowing into piscine and pasture truths, content as cows. The rhythm of rural life gives city and country boys a common ground on which to graze and compare, exchanging tips on the stock market and stream habitat, planting and harvesting kernels of ideas like so many frantic squirrels. Having few illusions about the validity of any of it, they flow along as if in a canoe floating downstream, captivated by their missions of nothing more than taking life in; savoring second and third streams of thought; dipping into the current of change.
Ah, to trip over a mutt, dozing out of the rain under a sagging, dripping tin canopy, is to have a gold star day. Cozy and comfy, this hole-in-the-wall haven, with none of that pizazz jazz, has Rockwell and a dozen other calendars sharing space with the funny papers, cartoons, business cards, birthday cards and 1st-graders’ drawings, thumbtacked up next to post cards from Tulsa and Tucson, and, Lordy, lookie: a hula girl from Honolulu. A blackboard special chalked in pink proclaims: “Creamed chicken over biscuits. Mashed potatoes, cranberries and carrots. $4.35.” Heaven to this hayseed kind of girl. This cafe counter just passed the first date test: cheerful and cheap and chummy.
Going north, south, east, west? Say no to tollway burgers. Head for those old highway counters along Illinois Highway 53. Wisconsin-too many routes to count. Ditto Michigan. Iowa’s U.S. 30 or 67. These counters court “comradery.” Bring on banter. All allow professional poseurs and police officers alike to perch in noble postures and swivel half-circles, commiserating while devouring a decent dinner. Counters give weary truckers and travelers a chance to exchange CB stories and polish up jokes; they give politicians and professors a place to pontificate on their own private grandstand of a stage stool.
Counters offer the perfect podium for a prosecutor to vent her anger by swatting a fly instead of a defendant-or the deer hunter next to her.
“God, where are his manners?” her look seems to say as she rattles her papers. Oblivious, he juts chin to cup, spoon-slurping his coffee, his nose in Field and Stream. Sharing this counter, this place, the two eventually join a contractor in a cosmopolitan conversation. The smell of sawdust mingles with maple syrup and Marlboros as the builder voices pipe dreams of marriage. If he had a wife, he wouldn’t have to stop here every morning for a good cup of hot coffee. But even if he had a Mrs., he’d be here. You can bet on it.
Yes, everyone pushing through the doors of these disappearing diners and cafes usually has only one aim: atmosphere served over-easy with conversation or newspapers. No yakety-yakking here, if you say so. Usually. Occasionally you get a nursing home runaway with little but time and mountains of memories to share-if you’re willing to listen. Sometimes even if you’re not.
On southwestern Wisconsin’s U.S. 61, Janice-at Christine’s Truck Stop in Fennimore-riles up her favorite pain-in-the-behind customer, then tunes him out and tunes in Reba on a ’70s portable radio hanging cockeyed on a coat rack. The music strums low over air waves keeping time with the second hand on the 7-Up clock, crooked and 10 minutes fast.
“Get a move on, Henry. You’re holdin’ up my tip traffic,” says Janice.
“If I weren’t 89, I’d put the moves on you, you young whippersnapper!” Henry replies.
“Work on those moves, Henry, and hurry back, ya hear?” she hollers after him as he tips his bent-out-of-shape baseball hat and shuffles out muttering to himself, making room for The-Stool-Twirler-Straw-Slurper.
Fennimore’s Rusty Zipper Crowd has a fresh face to query and entertain. And, whadayaknow, a fly-fisherman, at that. Janice explains how these hecklers got their obvious name. They all smile, showing different degrees of disappearing teeth, giving me a thumbs-up. They’re impressed. Not that I’m an angler. Fishermen are a buck a dozen in the Castle Rock area. But that I’m a female fly-fisherman, er, excuse me, fly-fisherlady, as they put it. Yep, I join the Rusty Zipper Crowd. Not quite one of them yet; give me another decade or so and some false teeth, but I’m headin’ that way.
These seniors-each and every one of them in either an oily, faded, dirty or brand-new baseball hat-heads all bobbing up and down, back and forth, are sincerely curious about the stranger, this out-of-place female trespassing on their turf-the one wearing a black baseball cap not sequined in bright bold letters. Still, even though my cap doesn’t have Wisconsin printed anywhere on it, they include me, and presto, I feel as if I’m 8 again. I twirl. I chatter.
Discussing nymphs and midges like one of the guys, I can’t help but giggle, recalling my father hissing, “Stop that infernal twirling or we’re goin’ to a-” Oh, no! Please, not a table! Tables are taboo. Too boring. Too confining. Too far removed for eavesdropping and kibitzing. And besides, at tables you can’t twirl and whirl and suck up good stuff in one slow turn. Same with straws. Twirl ice and suck up good stuff. Lemonade. Latte. Long Island Iced Teas. Must be a control thing, because, hey, I’m way, way beyond 8 now, and I still whirl and twirl and slurp up the dregs.
An inquisitor next to me recalls a beanery from his childhood. Now there’s a word I haven’t heard since Eisenhower-beanery, a cheap restaurant. Suddenly I’m back in Forrest, Ill. In the late ’50s. Peddling my aqua Huffy across railroad tracks, past the depot to the beanery, looking for my dad’s beat-up Ford, so I can dangle my legs and push off the counter and whirl round and round and give the menu a grown-up once over, then order flapjacks just like the big guys-tomboy that I used to be.
Last Saturday I drove down nearly deserted roads, heading south, meandering through time. Although the beanery was long gone, the dilapidated depot still stood there, lonely as a derelict and just as desolate. As I ambled down the abandoned, rusty tracks, a shade of oaks in October, grown over now with goldenrod and milkweeds, memories and the fragrance of French toast floated around me like a melancholy mist, and I swear I whiffed hot apple pie. I wanted to skip through that patched screen door again, hear it squeak shut and see Mason jars filled with marigolds centered on red-and-white checkered tablecloths, see my silver-haired, bib-overalled Grampa and other farmers hunkered over the counter, lined up like crows on a high wire, pouring coffee into their saucers or dunking doughnuts in scalding coffee, discussing John Deeres and soybeans.
I wanted to twirl myself back to a time when camaraderie was a way of life and only three blocks away. When all a kid had to do when she was lonely or bored was walk around the block and porch-visit. Instead-being a stranger now to these once intimate porches-I drove down the main street and around the corner to the Friendship House, where decades ago Crane’s Igloo served vanilla phosphates to a nervous 9-year-old twirling on a stool waiting for Jimmy Honegger to maybe walk by. It wasn’t quite the same, but it was close. Real close. As close as a woman can get to feeling like a kid again sitting at a hometown counter.
