Letter to a Terrible Waitress

Dear Terrible Waitress:

Waitressing is a stressful job. I say that with all sincerity - you're on your feet, having to be nice to people even when they're jerks, managing information, remembering orders and specials and faces, dealing with kitchen staff, dodging traffic... it can be a really tough gig.

I also understand the sexist stigma that comes with being a waitress as opposed to a waiter. Or at least, I do now, after doing a Google image search - when I searched for waiter, lots of charming clip-art surfaced immediately, featuring men in coattails carrying silver platters, smiling bus boys, and so on. When I plugged in waitress, several naked pictures turned up, along with ads for topless bars and strippers. (And the only word I was searching for was "waitress." That was it!) So I get it, and I'm sorry.

However.

You, sweetheart, you in particular, are just about the worst waitress imaginable.

First of all, when my friends and I are seated at the table, ready for you to take our drink order, you instead first spent no less than five minutes ranting to us about what bastards your last customers were, and how they didn't even leave you a tip. Initially, though a little weirded out by your over-the-top rant, you did have our sympathy.

Then, when we asked you what the specials on tap were, you didn't know. You had to go check. You took ten minutes to come back... and when you returned, you said "Oh, gosh y'all, I already forgot what all's on tap, it's so hard to remember! I do know we have Bud Light, or maybe it's Miller, or that other one?"

Like the nice (thirsty) patrons we are, we said anything was fine, really, and put in an order for an appetizer as well. Besides, tap lists change, sometimes it's hard to remember, no big deal.

Forget the fact that the appetizer didn't arrive until after the meal. Forget the fact that you got every salad dressing order wrong. I suppose we could blame the kitchen for those things; never know, it could be their fault. But these poor moves, I pin squarely on you:

• Talking with the cute guys one table over for 15 minutes, after we gave you our order and before you turned it over to the kitchen.
• Rolling your eyes when we asked where our appetizer was.
• Calling me sugar, baby, sweetheart, while keeping your eyes fixed on the men.
• Calling me sugar, baby, sweetheart, when you told me the kitchen was closing so you couldn't fix my mis-prepared order.
  
• Calling me sugar, baby, sweetheart, though you are probably about 5-10 years younger than I am (and I am not generally so irritated by overly intimate terms of endearment from strangers, but you really overshot your quota).
  

These were all bad calls, but the last straw was when we were waiting for our check, and I went inside to find you, and I saw you sitting at the bar doing shots with some other patrons.

And when you saw me, you hid. Like literally, dropped the shot glass, ran into the kitchen, and hid there for another 10 minutes before you brought us our bill...

...and I'm such a sucker, that when you brought us the bill and singled me out as the perpetually sympathetic one and gave me the tear-jerker line about how it's your first night and you're so new and overwhelmed, I typically would have been guilted into leaving you a gigantic tip.

Except that you told me it was your first night the last time you were my waitress. At this restaurant. Six weeks ago. So, sugar, work up a new routine, or find a new job, baby, because you are really a terrible waitress. Sweetheart.

Follow up to this post, 6/26/2007: due to our first choice venue being closed, my friend Mac and I wound up back at TW's restaurant again last night. And of course, we were seated in TW's section. And of course, TW was, well, T. But I felt so guilty about venting online, anonymously as it was, that I left her a 20% tip this time. Mac nearly killed me.

Father's Day

June 21, 1964: a Sunday. Three young civil rights activists journeyed to Neshoba County, Mississippi, to investigate the burning of Mt. Zion church, a gathering place for "the movement." James Chaney, a 21 year old black man, hailed from nearby Meridian, Mississippi. Michael Schwerner, a 24 year old white Jewish man, was a social worker, originally from New York, working for COFO out of Meridian. Andrew Goodman, a 20 year old white, Jewish college student, also from New York, had just completed training on strategies for working for black voter registration. He arrived in Meridian on June 20, ready to tackle the segregated South. June 21 was his first full day in Mississippi.

The three men visited the Mt. Zion ruins, then met with the local COFO group before heading back towards their Meridian base. Chaney, more familiar with the area than the two New Yorkers, was driving the blue Ford station wagon through the winding rural roads. Somewhere around 5pm, Chaney was pulled over, allegedly for speeding, and all three men were arrested and taken to the Neshoba County jail, where they were denied any phone calls.

The sweat that must have trickled down each back: Mississippi in late June, in the early sixties. Three civil rights workers, one black, two Jewish, all young and achingly idealistic, apprehended in one of the most notoriously racist areas of the country. No air conditioning. No equality. Local law enforcement violently protective of their right to white supremacy. Imagine the smell of salt and fear, the rising temperatures of both weather and men.

Probably much to their surprise, Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were released around 10 p.m. that day, permitted to return to their vehicle. They climbed into the Ford, navigated their way back to Highway 19, once again Meridian-bound, undoubtedly both angry and relieved at their capture and release, eager to leave Neshoba County.

Only they never were permitted to leave Neshoba. Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner disappeared that night. On June 22, 1964, the charred remains of the blue Ford station wagon were found near Bogue Chitto swamp. Nearly a month and a half later, the remains of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were found buried in an earthen dam, fifteen feet deep, on a farm six miles outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Justice did not reside in Mississippi in 1964. The brutal murders of three young men went virtually unpunished. As Ben Chaney, James' younger brother, noted in a 1999 speech, the many, many guilty conspirators were essentially slapped on the wrist:

"Three years after their murders, twenty-one Klansmen were arrested by the FBI, and on February 27, 1967, a federal grand jury for the Southern District of Mississippi indicted nineteen members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (White Knights) under Title 18, section 241, for conspiracy 'on or about January 1, 1964, and continuing to, on or about December 4, 1964, to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate Michael Henry Schwerner, James Earl Chaney, and Andrew Goodman.' A two-week federal trial in Meridian, Mississippi, resulted in seven guilty verdicts and sentences ranging from three to ten years."

It would be more than 40 years before anyone was convicted for the deaths of Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman, rather than merely conspiring to "injure, oppress, threaten and intimidate them." In January of 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, a Neshoba County minister, was indicted by a Neshoba County grand jury for the murders of the three men -- and on June 21, 2005, exactly forty-one years after the three civil rights workers disappeared, Killen was convicted -- on three counts of manslaughter, not murder. Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman were murdered.

Here in Jackson, Klansman James Ford Seale, was just convicted on two counts of kidnapping and one of conspiracy in connection with the 1964 murders of two black teenagers, Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore. Kidnapping and conspiracy, not murder. Dee and Moore were murdered.

Cases are difficult to try more than 40 years later, and the progress this state has made in the willingness to try, convict, and try to right old wrongs should not be overlooked. However, it's also a tricky balance between moving on and not losing our memory. There is something to be said for forgiveness. There is something to be said for honesty. There is still work to be done, and it is not any one person or group's responsibility to do the work. It is a collective imperative.

June 21, 1964, was the day James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were killed. June 21, 1964, was also Father's Day. All of these men died in their early twenties. One of them, Michael, left a young widow, Rita Schwerner, who continues to work for social justice. None lived long enough to experience fatherhood. On this Father's Day, June 17, 2007, I sat again in the sanctuary at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers are memorialized each year. The crowd was smaller than it has been in years past; the 40th anniversary in 2004 was a huge media event, but after the big anniversary, and the subsequent conviction of Killen in 2005, the media has largely exited now. There are fewer cameras, and the story seemed less emphasized, even at the service. So I wanted to tell the story. On this Father's Day, what happened to these three young men should be clearly remembered -- and Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner deserve to be remembered not only as martyrs to a cause, but also as true fathers of change.

This post is dedicated to my dad, Ken Kander. Happy Father's Day...
The information (details of timeline, convictions, etc) was gathered from the following sources: the program and service at Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, Philadelphia, MS; Wikipedia entry on "Mississippi Civil Rights Worker Murders;" Clarion Ledger and Jackson Free Press articles on the trial and convictions of Edgar Ray Killen and James Ford Seale; National Public Radio archives on Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman, Killen, and Seale; and a speech delivered by Ben Chaney to the American Bar Association in 1999.

Technical Difficulties

Due to technical difficulties, this blog is being published on Monday rather than Sunday. I still have not had internet set up at my apartment, since I will be moving again this week, but there are several open networks I had been able to tap into... until last night. Suddenly, the friendly unencrypted network named "default" was gone, and had been replaced by an encrypted network called "CHRIST." Seriously. I ask you, what is the message in someone naming a network after their divine, and then closing it off to the rest of the world??

Due to the aforementioned technical difficulties, I scrapped the original posting I was working on (a nice warm-fuzzy one about working on a Peace House build in downtown Jackson) and have decided to focus instead on technical difficulties. This blog is supposed to transcend my own experience and attempt to probe the universal (nothing like a nice, easy goal), but this time I'm curious: is this a universal phenomenon? Does everyone have the same battle scars from strange tech wars that I do? Does anyone?

Technical, and specifically technological difficulties, have long been a theme in my life, and for this I blame my mother. My mother is certainly a more wounded soldier in the tech wars than I am. She has something that our family has dubbed the Personal Electro-Magnetic Forcefield, or PEMF. Due to her PEMF, my mom is something of a mutant. She has this bizarre, uncontrollable power to alter every clock she touches, any car she drives, any household appliance she so much as looks at. Maybe at one point I doubted the power of the PEMF, but I have been a believer for years now. When she inhabits their space, clocks literally stop working, people. She even made a microwave explode once.

As you might imagine, then, technical difficulties are pretty routine for our family. We long ago learned to just plan around mom's PEMF, by adopting some simple principles: if a drop of rain falls, the power will go out at my parents' house, so always have candles and flashlights. Expect frequent car breakdowns, so always have a cell phone and some high-calorie snacks in the trunk. Do not let her touch the DVD player.

The fear is now that I might have inherited the PEMF. Like an X-Man's mutant powers, it does not always manifest until early adulthood, and then suddenly, BAM: your physiological construction is just different, and you have to live with it. The evidence is mounting for the existence of my own PEMF. To highlight just a few indicators:

• My car has seizures that the mechanics can't explain.
• My cell phone sometimes calls me. (Seriously, sometimes the phone rings and when I answer it, it's my voicemail. And it was calling with a call-ring, not my voice-mail beep, and there are no new messages. I can't explain it.)
• Wireless networks appear and disappear when I touch my Mac.
• My Mac, a laptop I purchased due to the "Macs never crash" mantra invoked by all Macaholics, frequently crashes. And every time I re-start it, the time/date is set to 7pm Wednesday, December 3, 1969, so none of my programs will work until I correct the time/date. Every time.
  

There appears to be nothing I can do, so the goal now is to learn to master the PEMF. It has been suggested that if my mother were to go and hug all the nuclear bombs in the world, they would all be instantly disarmed. Perhaps her technical difficulty is the answer to world peace. Perhaps those of us who cannot help but move through life with technical difficulties should unite and learn to channel our strange little power.

Chew on that one the next time you can't program your DVD player.

Pomp & Circumstance

My brother Adam graduated from college last week. (In probably the most anti-climactic attempt at a surprise ever, I didn't tell him that I was going to drive with my mom up from Mississippi to attend his commencement. Though delighted to see me, when I approached him "unexpectedly" at the campus coffee shop our family always seems to patronize, after giving me a big hug he shrugged and said "I sort of figured you'd be here.")

The day before his actual graduation, we attended campus functions - the student circus, an evening open-air quad festival with music and hundreds of multi-colored hanging Chinese lanterns, a surprise birthday party for a friend of his (including a pinata, whose contents were largely confiscated by random kids unknown to my brother and his friends). It was threatening rain all that day, and there were murmurs about what might happen if it rained on commencement day, since the exercises were all to take place outdoors. As it happened, the next morning the sun shone down brightly on the little campus.

It was a long but lovely ceremony, with many speakers. I was moved to tears by the main commencement speaker, who began with an apology to the class for the fact that their inheritance is a world at war. This was not the focal point of her speech, but it made me think- particularly when she mentioned a photo she had seen on the cover of the New York Times that morning of a war widow, a young woman the same age as the graduates sitting expectantly in their folding chairs that morning.

The comment lodged itself somewhere in my mind. In some idle Googling days later, thinking about commencement and the armed forces, I turned up the fact that "Pomp & Circumstance" is actually a military march. For some reason, though I'm sure I have heard that before, that little piece of information was jarring. So, this is how we traditionally mark the completion of an educational phase: we have the graduates parade before us to stirring military music. An appropriate metaphor might be, they march out as soldiers into the battlefield of life, adequately trained and well-quipped to emerge victorious, decorated officers. It still might be a bit of a pompous, war-glorifying metaphor, but I can see the poetry. Unfortunately, reality seems to steamroll pretty imagery. With little room to feel distant from the situation as my first cousin, a recent high school graduate, is currently in Air Force training, I can't help but wonder: how many of our young people will be heading not into similes of service, but actual service time?

I remember when I graduated from high school, there was a popular (and popularly ridiculed) recording by Baz Luhrman called "Wear Sunscreen." It began like this:

Ladies and gentleman of the class of 1999, wear sunscreen. If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proven by scientists, where the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable than my own meandering experience.

I swear I'm not always so dark, but as I commented to Adam, those lyrics are clearly dated. I envisioned a sort of gallows-humor comedy send-up, a modernization of the words:

Ladies and gentleman of the class of 2007, don't worry about the sunscreen. Between terrorists and global warming and avian flu and wars you may well have to personally fight in, the likelihood of the sun being the cause of your demise seems pretty slim to me. Consider yourself lucky if you wind up living long enough to get melanoma. Anyway, there's lots of money being dedicated to cancer research... right? Wait, what? Those funds are being diverted? Oh, well, like I said, forget about the sunscreen.

Don't panic, now - I am kidding, and that's supposed to be funny... it's just that it's also a little frightening. I understand that there are no easy answers, that safety and security, pride, peace, protection, pomp and circumstances are all confusing and conflicting values. I also keep seeing hope: the sort of small kindnesses that were the ultimate focus of the commencement speaker's address, the love and support that unexpectedly lifts us individually...

..and, they didn't play "Pomp & Circumstance" at my brother's graduation.

(This post is dedicated to Adam, who is a thinker, who appreciates gallows-humor, and who wouldn't have wanted me to post something sappy about how proud of him I am... but for the record, this big sister couldn't be prouder.)