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<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\u201cWould you like some fresh ground pepper on your salad, sir?\u201d 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\u2019s, affectionately known as Clink\u2019s. 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, \u201cOrder up!\u201d, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s errand. I do the only other thing I can think of: I fake it. I hold the pepper grinder confidently over the gentleman\u2019s salad and begin twisting away, while he watches in admiration of my technique.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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