Pat was my boss at the diner. I’d say she was around fifty years old, but I don’t know for sure. That’s just not the kind of question you ask your boss. Donnie the dishwasher was thirty-five, with the mental capacity of an adolescent. Then again, how many teens do you know who could work a forty-hour week and pay their bills on time?
I was seventeen when I started working there. The second shift, 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., meant no late nights and, more important, no early mornings. The diner was open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. On Christmas that year, we got our first real snow of the season. No accumulation, just swirly snow-globe snow. My walk to work that day seemed longer than usual because of the quiet. You’ve never known quiet until you’ve walked downtown St. Paul on Christmas Day. Actually, this wasn’t just downtown St. Paul Sunday quiet, this was a higher grade of silence, like the difference between gold and platinum. It was ominously beautiful, like an act of God or something. Like the Rapture. I could see the diner up ahead, glowing dimly in the snow, the Pancake House of Purgatory.
When I got there, Donnie was quartering chickens back at the prep table, singing and dancing and slipping around on chicken guts on the floor. I put on a clean apron and took my station behind the counter. It never dawned on me that Christmas might be dead on top of everything else. Pat slapped a Phillips screwdriver in my one hand and a bleach-soaked towel in the other. She said, “No way you’re gonna sit on your rear all day and moan, kiddo. We all got other places we’d rather be. You’re gonna take apart the pie case and scrub it down.” Three hours later, Donnie had moved on to chopping onions, I had the pie case put back together, Pat had the meat cooler sparkling, and we got our first customer.
Al Vanoni was a fat cab driver who always carried his own insulated coffee cup with him. That thing was about the size of an ice-cream bucket, suiting the scale of his body. If Vanoni tried to drink out of one of our coffee cups, he would have looked silly, like a fairy-tale giant. He came in wearing a Santa hat and ordered a double patty melt to go, on the double. “I’d love to stay and talk, but I got volleys all day between the senior high-rises and the suburbs.” When Vanoni went for the ketchup, he pounded his meaty hand on the bottom of the bottle, sending a fair-sized splat onto his patty melt, and a fair-sized one onto my pie case. Before he left, I saw him sneak a small brown paper bag to Pat.
Pat said I might as well order my shift meal as long as the grill was dirty, so she wouldn’t have to clean it twice. She yelled back to Donnie to do the same. Ten minutes later, she told us to have a seat in one of the back booths. “Today, we can eat like human beings at the table, at least.” I plugged the buck that Vanoni gave me into the tableside jukebox, and entered some Mitch Miller tunes.
Pat brought over three cups of coffee; when I sipped mine it turned out to be laced with Wild Turkey. I looked at her in surprise. She smiled. “Doncha know that Santa always comes on Christmas?”
Pat closed her eyes and bent her head to pray. I thought it was a joke at first, what with the whiskey and all. Donnie followed her lead. I looked down, but admit I kept my eyes open. I still heard the words.
“Heavenly Father, thank you for this day, and this good food.”
The whipped cream on Donnie’s sundae smelled wonderful as it melted into the waffle squares.
“Thank you for our families. At home, at work, and in Christ your son our savior.”
I looked from Pat’s strong face to Donnie’s earnest one, and I felt as close to them as anyone else in my life.
“Search our hearts, God, and please bless and keep us in the path of your everlasting light. Amen.”
In that instant, before either of them opened their eyes, I felt if God had searched my heart, he would have found it as spotless as the pie case. It felt new, and shiny.
In the past twenty years, I’ve had family Christmases and orphan Christmases. Work Christmases, hospital Christmases, Christmases when the tree fell down and the turkey caught fire, and Christmases when everything went just right.
My Christmas at the diner taught me that Christmas is transferable. The only responsibility you have to Christmas, wherever you are, whoever you’re with, wherever you’re headed, is to put it in a to-go box.
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