Apropos of Nothing

Some days I fill up some of this space with little more than words flung against the screen as if to prove they, the screen and I all exist. Most days the best I can get is two out of three. And somedays. like this one, even less. At the time I called it:

The Hole's in the Hat, not in the Heart

At the counter of a fast food place yesterday I flashed on a memory of 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 and remains so to this day. 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 East 62nd Street, I would have already been a fish-out-of-water kid from New Jersey, no money in the family if I weren't also 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 often 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 in this fast food joint, trying to have my order taken by a gum-chewer that could have been me fifty 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 McMinimum Wage plus a Nickel Associates, are wearing visors--not a hair net in the crowd.

I've always loved the late George Carlin's contemptuous characterization of visors as 'half a hat' and in terms of the original purpose of hairnets in places that prepared food, he's right. The visors everyone now wears 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 is little difference and even less distinction. I do think hairnets would come in handy on Fridays, though fishnets might be better, but I'm a little old school.

-bill kenny