Thursday night family

Before I picked up my life and moved it to Colombia, I spent every Thursday night at a little restaurant right outside of Oxford. I’d leave school, headed toward home, and stop at The Sizzler to wait tables and make some extra money for the week. It was just a job at first and a chance to hang out with a family I’d worked for at a summer camp what seemed like ages ago. But that sentiment didn’t last long.

Thursday nights were the slowest of the weekend, but packed full of regulars that weasled their way into my Southern heart. The couple that always sits by the door and likes glass glasses and lots of sweetner. A man and his aging mother, him with his paper and her watching him eat, glad to be out with her son for awhile. Grandparents that drink real Coke with a straw and always order fried oysters and turnip greens. And university professors whose husbands carry chocolate in their shirt pockets.

A retired English teacher was the other Thursday night waitress and she and I would bustle through the place, slinging steaks, pouring tea over clinking ice, and topping off coffee cups. She taught me how to carry four plates at once and two glasses in one hand and how to sweep like a mad woman and use a dust pan with a giraffe stance. We dodged each other effortlessly, sweating, giggling occassionally at ill mannered diners, rarely slowing down before closing time. And then we’d sit across from each other counting our tip money and talking about life a little before we called it a night.

Yesterday, I got two boxes in the mail. Two boxes packed carefully and mailed from that little restaurant just outside of Oxford. Magazines, peanut butter, gum, school supplies, and handwritten letters. I recognized all of the writing easily and smiled at the thought of that rowdy cook scrawling me a note and teared up a bit as I read a letter from Judy who said, “I’m the new Thursday Emily although I haven’t been able to fill your shoes just yet.”

But the letter that I read over and over again was the one in the flowing script of that retired English teacher. The script I’ve seen on countless tickets hanging from an order board. And I couldn’t help but smile a little and picture her sitting across from me talking about all the animals that she feeds, the children that she raised, the husband that she loved.

It is, after all, Thursday.

-Emily Witt

Oxford friend living in Colombia for a while

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