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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
My sense of relief at the doctor’s opinion was quickly tempered by my growling stomach, and the realization that I wasn’t in Kelly anymore.
After being bugged by Miss Rhonda for years to ask a doctor about a suspicious lump, I finally remembered to mention it to Brother Bruce. He had poked, prodded, spindled and mutilated me through a somewhat overdue physical, and the lump was enough to draw his interest.
“But I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,” Bruce said. “Let’s be sure.”
He sent me to a surgeon in Wilmington, where I waited my turn amongst a bunch of other folks whose doctors had also sent them to see another doctor.
As an aside, I couldn’t help but notice how folks in the Atkinson medical office didn’t pay any attention to the hairy man in a tie reading his Bible, but some of the folks in the city medical office seemed almost offended – but that’s a column for another day.
The surgeon was a nice fellow named Jim Harris. He, too, poked, prodded, and manipulated the lump, and he, too, said it was nothing to worry about.
“If it bothers you in 20 years,” he said, “come back and see me then.”
I was free and clear and standing in a parking lot, thanking God for a good report, when I realized I was hungry. I also realized the city I once loved had long since become a strange place, and I’m not big on eating in strange places.
My old haunts, the blue-collar blue-plate diners where I ate as a college student, deckhand, and young newspaper reporter are now long gone, so I knew I couldn’t find a familiar place with real, honest food. To go home or to the Driftwood would be silly, since people with clean bills of health are expected to get back to work as soon as possible, and that would take me an hour out of the way.
I weighed my options. I could lower my standards and eat at one of those plastic fake-food places. I could skip lunch for a week after eating in a sit-down restaurant. Or I could wait.
Growling almost as loudly as my stomach, I crept through the traffic of rubberneckers at a minor car crash and wondered what would possess people to become so obsessed with the material things that they just have to live like mice in a box of snake-chow– all jammed in together, barely surviving, never really happy, looking forward to the day when they would be eaten.
There was that darn food thing again.
And then there was the Burger Hut.
I must admit, I’d nearly forgotten the place; this is sad, since the Hut is the kind of place I prefer to feed myself. It’s where people are honest and friendly, and the food is good and plentiful.
There was a group of four or five folks at one table, and the two ladies behind the counter. Nobody else was around at this late lunchtime on a Friday. I could sit at the counter and smoke, since everyone else seemed to have a cigarette, too. There were no heat lamps, no commercial microwave ovens, and my two cheeseburgers were made to perfection on a big flat grill.
The ladies were politely curious (“You must just be passing through,” one said. “I know you’re not from here.”) but they weren’t nosy. The folks at the table were obviously friends of the proprietors, since much of their conversation involved family news and expressions of concern for people named Bigfoot and Cooter, among others.
No one minded when I was halfway drawn into a general conversation about a pending grandbaby. Indeed, everyone seemed to expect me to laugh when the prospective grandma accidentally made a joke, at her own expense. She laughed the loudest, so I felt like I would have been rude, even if the faux pas wasn’t funny. As it was, the gaffe was hilarious.
I thought of the frowning people I saw in traffic an hour before, and wondered how many could have benefited from a few minutes on a stool at the Burger Hut, the Driftwood, Hobb’s Corner, Penn’s or any other non-neon, handmade, home-cooked branch of Heaven.
How many of the nervous or frustrated or angry or bored folks at the doctor’s office needed a few minutes in an eatery with no pretension, just good food? For that matter, I wondered if both Jim Harris and Bruce Williams couldn’t stand a visit to a roadside diner. Both struck me as the type of men who would appreciate such a place, even if the menu wasn’t what the doctor ordered.
I left the Burger Hut with a takeout cup of tea, a full belly, and a better attitude. I even smiled a little, and it usually takes me two days to smile again after visiting any place with a population of more than a thousand people.
The Hut gave me the same type of mental therapy one of Brian’s omelets or a pair of grilled ham and cheese sandwiches provide. I had a few minutes to eat and laugh and visit and wind down. Diners can make us better people, if we’ll let them.
Shoot, I even had time to feel sorry for all the poor sods back there in that mouse-cage of a city, just waiting for the snake to get hungry again, and forgetting about really important things like grandbabies, good reports, and handmade cheeseburgers.
Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. He may be reached via telephone at 642-4104, ext. 227, or via email at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.
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