Saturday morning, and I am at The Bad Waitress again.
This is a medium-sized restaurant in Minneapolis at the corner of 26th Street and Nicollet, a stretch of avenue known as "Eat Street." A couple of blocks south of here, Nicollet's run of restaurants, ethnic markets, and coffeeshops is interrupted by a featureless, vast wall: the back of an enormous K-Mart. The K-Mart and its wide parking lot, awash in taco trucks and gulls picking its broad expanse for discarded fast-food bags, faces the lower-rent neighborhood where I live. Eat Street, and the downtown area with the convention center and the Hyatt at its southern edge, is thus protected, slightly, from my immediate neighbors. One can almost imagine the city planners sketching it in, and pausing as an afterthought to add the White Castle and the Popeye's next door, hoping to distract any peckish South Siders who might consider going the long way round and find themselves on the other side.
In the last five or six years the corner of Nicollet and 38th has sprung a tiny cluster of restaurants and coffee shops. A new co-op/grocery is being constructed on 38th. I think critical mass has been reached. I predict that someday, the traffic patterns will change, and Eat Street will reach all the way to where I live. I predict the eventual demise of the K-Mart.
That will be good for me, I suppose. Maybe not for the current K-Mart shoppers who live near here and can walk there or get there easily on the bus. (I go there too, myself, to pick up the odd bit of school supplies or sunblock.) Neighborhoods change, and it is not always easy to tot up what is for the better, for the common good, and what is not.
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That was quite a digression.
So I am sitting here in The Bad Waitress on a Saturday. I nearly always go out by myself on a Saturday morning. For a few years I made a point of trying lots of different breakfast spots. I have had some outstanding breakfasts, some of them memorable. After a while, though, I found that I settled down to a pattern of going to the same three places, unless an errand took me elsewhere. All three are open quite early, all three have wifi, all three will sell me caraway rye toast with my breakfast, and there the similarities mostly end.
This morning I was driving back from the southern end of town, having dropped off my sons and H's at an outing for Scouts, and I thought of a breakfast place I had never tried and keep meaning to try, that I would pass on the way. I didn't know when it opened, but it was 8:45, later than I am usually out. I decided to try it if it was open. But when I arrived at the parking lot, it was still shuttered, probably one of the many restaurants around here that opens at 9 am.
As I pulled out, I realized that I felt relieved. The Bad Waitress was where I had wanted to go all along.
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Some mornings -- this morning is one -- I feel an anxious desperation to be here. I actually have a craving, not so much for scrambled eggs with kale and goat cheese and buttered, toasted caraway rye, but just for sitting here at this table, in this space.
I do not know why. Seriously. I cannot put my finger on anything particularly special about this restaurant. Nothing wrong with it either. But I want to be here. Sitting at one of the tables by the big windows. Looking out them, at the fairly nondescript view: the parking meters, the bicycle racks, the pizza restaurant across the street, the payday-loan place on the opposite corner. The people hurrying past, extra fast today to coax a little warmth from inside themselves to fight the frigid weather.
This is a place where you write your order on a card and bring it to the cashier, and later a server brings it. They do fresh squeezed juice and coffee, and also pots of tea (I am having one now, after having finished my food, to stave off the guilt of occupying a table as people begin to come in for the late-morning breakfast rush). The tea is good -- it's pure, intense ginger, with a shot of honey, my favorite infusion, but it is not the reason I crave this place either.
I can't figure it out. The best I can do is that here I feel anonymous. I could be anyone. I could be no one. I am not alone, exactly. I am surrounded by people -- hipsters and elderly couples, people with dreadlocks and piercings and people with utterly conventional dress, parents with children, clusters of young women, people with newspapers and people with smartphones, solo breakfasters chatting with each other at the counter stools. I am surrounded by people, by noise and laughter, the clink of silverware and the hiss of steam, the radio playing oldies (actual oldies from before the 1980s). I hear many conversations but no words.
I am the forty-year-old woman all by herself in the far corner booth, in the white fleece and brown knit cap, typing away on an iPad as she finishes the last cup of tea, hoping not to attract glares from the queue of people who are still waiting for a table.
Something about this place makes me feel like nobody or anybody in a way that feels delicious, luxurious. I have to get up and go. Errands I have to run, and by the way my tea is gone, and with it my excuse to go on occupying the table. Nevertheless my heart will be sitting here in this booth all week. It's crazy. I don't know why. I keep coming back.
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