When I was in the restaurant business, I had an employee come to me one day with a particularly embarrassed look on her face. When I inquired as to what was the problem, she explained that she had a couple walk out without paying their bill.
“What table?” I asked, and she indicated a vacant table on the far corner. I looked at the table, where I knew an elderly couple had been sitting not too long before, then back to the server. “Do you mean to tell me that elderly couple got all the way out the door and off the lot from that far table without you seeing them?”
With a shrug, she replied, “Yeah.”
I looked again at the long walk our couple would have had to walk to get to the door. “Did you check the-?” I started to ask.
“Yep,” she said. “I checked the ladies, and sent Chad in to check the mens. Not there. And I asked everyone. No one saw them leave.”
“The hostess?”
“Doesn’t remember them leaving.”
The server started to relax a little as she watched me checking out the possibility of two people in their eighties, moving slow, getting from their table to the door without a sole not only noticing them, but apparently not wishing them a good night, or asking them if everything was okay. Like slow moving vapor, they had apparently just floated to the door.
Finally, I began laughing. The server joined me.
“Now that,” I pronounced, “is a phenomenon.”
And that is what Gramma used to say every time she emerged from the bathroom to find me waiting there for my turn. “It’s a phenomenon,” she would say.
That is what Gramma used to say when I would meet her head-on in the doorway between the dining room and the kitchen of mom’s house. “You want through here,” she says, and tries to hurry. “It’s a phenomenon.”
Telling Mom of the times Gramma has called our meetings a phenomenon, I got this reply, “ I know. The same thing happens to me. Every time I need to get through there, there she is.”
And then I got to thinking about it. There are many times in the day I go through that doorway unimpeded by Gramma walking through it. There are many times in the day I go to the bathroom without finding out she is in there. However, there are few times that she makes her way through the house without running into one of us. That is the phenomenon. To Gramma.
We wonder how, if she moves that slow, do we several times a day end up meeting her at the doorway or are just behind her at getting in the restroom. She wonders, if we move that fast, how is it possible for her to always be in the path to where we are going, or in the place where we need to be.
What is baffling to me is the number of times I meet her in the doorway when I was certain she was somewhere else in the house. There have been many times, while meeting her coming from the kitchen side of the doorway, I have been shocked by the direction in which I find her moving. I have, many times, actually looked behind me toward the living room, convinced I had just left her sitting in her chair.
“So you got to the bathroom and are now heading back without me seeing you?” I think as I check the chair just to be sure some glitch in the space time continuum does not have Gramma in two places at once.” And as slow as she moves, how could –“
“It’s a phenomenon,” her voice echoes in my head.
This I also tell Mom, to which she replies, “Yeah, it happens to me all the time.”
Indeed, the true phenomenon is not about her moving slow. (Using the number of times I walk through that doorway in a day versus the number of times she does, the odds are simply pretty good that I’ll run into her on the few times she crosses the threshold.) The true phenomenon is about how fast we are moving. We are moving so fast, we feel that we either can’t keep track of her, or she’s constantly in the way. We move so fast, we don’t even register the moment we passed Gramma as she was heading toward the bathroom. We only remember the shock of meeting her in the doorway on her way back– when we had to slow down enough to see what was right in front of us.
Yes, that elderly couple walked a perfect path through the pinballs that were my restaurant staff without running into a single person who might remind them they hadn’t paid. And, I can only imagine the conversation they had on the drive home if one of them remembered.
“George, we didn’t pay for our food.”
“Yes we did. We always pay.”
“No we didn’t.”
“Well, why didn’t someone catch us on the way out?”
“I don’t know. I guess they were all just so busy they didn’t notice us.”
