I didn't contact her after making sure it was the right person as almost four and a half decades have passed since we last spoke and I don't have a way cool and suave sentence to cover that amount of absence but it was weird, even for me.
As I start to clear out an office I've been in for over a quarter of a century (a little bit at a time of course) and prepare to close this chapter of the story of my life, I'm surprised how often my possible pasts have come to visit and share part of my dreams.
For no particular reason the day I recalled Edna, the lunch lady at The Browning School for Boys.
First a digression: the name says it all. When I went there for part of the late sixties, it was all boys but that changed at some point since (they waited for me to leave perhaps). If you thought the school was named for Robert Browning, himself a poet but best known for being married to the far more famous Elizabeth Barrett Browning, sorry-no.
Sandwiched between Park and Madison Avenues on the East side, I would have already been a fish out of water, kid from New Jersey, no money in the family, if I weren't the son of the Lower School Headmaster. Yeah, those were good times-and if anyone from the Alumni Association is reading this today, now you understand why I never respond to any of the notes you send.
Just about the only person I felt comfortable with would have been Edna who rationed the hot lunches with a zeal that often led me to wonder if part of her salary and benefits package wasn't in being permitted to take home to her family the food she didn't serve to us. Stranger things have happened-in my years as a Browning Gentleman, I ate many of those stranger things.
Edna always wore a hair net, always. On Valentine's Day it was red; on Saint Patrick's Day it was green. I was always grateful we had no school on the Fourth of July. I'd watch her leave in the afternoon, staring out the rear window of (Mr.) Clair Smith's homeroom, as she walked the block and a half to the subway that took her home.
So self-absorbed was I as a callow and shallow lad, I had no idea where she, nor, for that matter, where any of our teachers lived and it was only decades later that I realized I never knew. But I can recall the hairnet and understood the reason for it-bought in on it, hook, line and sinker.
So here I am, trying to have my order taken by a gum-chewer that could have been me forty years ago. A person who did me a favor showing up for work this morning, and just ask her and she'll tell you, but won't do me another favor by leaving. I realized she, and all the other plus a Nickel Associates, are wearing visors--not a hair net in the crowd.
When you go to a McMinimum Wage fast food place now, there are no hairnets but, rather, visors and I guess the Health Department has bought in on that though I'm not sure that anyone has actually thought that part through.
I've always loved the late George Carlin's contempt of visors, calling them 'half a hat' and in terms of the original purpose of hairnets in places that prepared food, he's right. The visors everyone now wear are part of that uniform the McArmy of One, no matter the franchise, wants us to experience. Considering most of these places don't actually make food, but reheat the edible units (or whatever the corporate statement calls them) for consumption, I suppose there's little difference and even less distinction. I do think the hairnets would come in handy on Fridays, but I'm a little old school.
-bill kenny
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