“Would you like some fresh ground pepper on your salad, sir?” I ask dutifully. I am nineteen years old, far from home and family, and I am dressed like a tavern wench, complete with ruffled skirt and blouse, white stockings, cameo choker and mob cap. The scene is a since-defunct Anchorage restaurant known as Clinkerdagger, Bickerstaff and Pett’s, affectionately known as Clink’s. I am working as a lunch waitress, and my station is full to the brim. Somewhere in the distance I hear the line cooks yelling, “Order up!”, several seated customers are staring at me and hoisting their coffee cups, and one is obviously ready for me to take her credit card. The gentleman nods to my offer of the pepper, and I reach behind me to one of the pepper stations, and pick up the table-leg-sized grinder. The moment I lift it I can tell it is empty.
Whose job was it to fill the pepper grinders after lunch yesterday? I have no idea, but whoever it was has let me down. What to do? Run around from station to station searching for a full grinder? If Whosit forgot to fill one, she probably forgot them all, so such a search would be a fool’s errand. I do the only other thing I can think of: I fake it. I hold the pepper grinder confidently over the gentleman’s salad and begin twisting away, while he watches in admiration of my technique.
He must have seen that there was no pepper coming out. How could he not? And yet, he said not a word, gave no glimmer that anything might be amiss. I ground out what I thought to be a reasonable amount of imaginary pepper, returned the grinder to its perch, and bravely asked the gentleman if he would like anything else. He said no, thanked me sincerely, and tucked into his pepperless lunch.
Every so often I think of that moment. This gentleman saw an opportunity to give a break to someone who needed it, and he did so without offering up one scrap of what nowadays we would call virtue-signaling. I recall nothing about him, including his age at the time, but on the far outside chance that he should read this account and remember the incident, I offer him my thanks.
Source for the picture, which isn’t far wrong: Peugeot-Paris-Prestige-1987-Pepper-Mill-image-1-1024×1024.jpg (1024×1024) (d2cdo4blch85n8.cloudfront.net)
A very understated kindness – someone who was truly paying attention and understood your dilemma. Empathy! (Or maybe he didn’t have his glasses on and had no taste buds.) I think I’ll choose to believe the empathy explanation.
I confess, I have wondered on occasion if he truly did not notice, but the empathy angle is my story and I’m sticking to it! Thanks for your reply.
This is both touching and hilarious, Evelyn. Again, love your writing!
Thank you. I appreciate your kind words!
This great story reminds me of a couple of similar incidents with a small child in a crowded antique store. In the first store, small child bumped into a table with knickknacks, rattling them but not breaking anything. The store manager swarmed over and told me, glaring at small child, “If she breaks it, she pays for it.” (Mama told me later that I should have said, “She will immediately start saving her allowance.”) In the second store, small child bumped into something and I scolded her. The store manager hurried over, told me to leave the child alone, and said she never made customers pay for anything they broke. Then she added that in all her years managing an antique store she had never seen a child break anything. “However,” she added, “We have lost plenty of merchandise to ladies swinging their purses around.”
While I am pretty sure we all end up in the same place, I like to think the second manager (who has since passed away) had a special place reserved in heaven.
That lady was a gem, and I agree that her reward should be extra special.