Shameless Love Story in Waffle House Paradise

The joint was decidedly not jumping, but that’s the way I wanted. All to ourselves on a Saturday night. The sky was a slate gray, threatening rain like a carrot in front of a donkey. The kids slid up onto chrome bar stools with bright red seats and looked down the laminated menus. We grabbed several sections of newspaper and the two seats beside the girls. Pretty rough looking customers, the four of us. Literally just having changed out of pajamas into shorts, shirt and flip flops. Bed head hair after a glorious afternoon of napping and reading. Hot chocolate, hot tea, Hi-C, sweet tea. Scrambled eggs, hash browns, everything on ‘em.
Our very pregnant waitress waddled toward the short order cook hollering: “I’m gonna need these scattered, smothered, capped, peppered….” The Bug and the Pea’s attention drifts to the Kids’ Page word search and heads bent together, they began to work.
“Honey, you gonna need some whipped cream on that chocolate?”
“Yeah” says the Pea as she circles a word, acting like she owns the joint.
“Yes MA'AM,” I correct, with an apologetic look in my eye.
The waitress grins, “Don’t worry, got three of my own at home.”
Despite the fact we’ve done nothing productive on this Saturday, the food we devoured would have satisfied an army of hungry soldiers.
The quiet is broken, the jukebox pipes in with a song. Startled, the Bug’s head pops up from her plate, in time to see a teenage boy stroll back to his booth.
“Just the jukebox, sweetie,” I say, mouth full of salsa covered hash browns.
“The what?” she asks.
I see the blank look in her eyes and I set down the fork. I. Am. Unfit. There are no other words that fit this moment. I look over at the husband who looks as stunned as me. How, in the name of all that is good, do our children NOT know what a jukebox is? Clearly, our parenting skills are slipping. I mean, seriously.
I slide off the bar stool, toting the kids along with me by the scruff of their little necks. I stood them in front of the jukebox and did some explaining...long overdue apparently. They gazed in bedazzled wonderment. I pressed the white buttons to scroll through the selection of choices. The Pea’s forehead leaned against the glass and the Bug’s jaw dropped near the floor.
See? You can pick from any of these songs! Oh look, they have Jimmy Buffet, “Cheeseburger in Paradise! I like mine with lettuce and tomatoes, Heinz 57 and French Fried Potatoes…” I grooved to the imaginary beat.
The Bug put her hand on my elbow, “Mama, please do not sing.”
Undeterred, I pointed to the Beach Boys, “Let’s go surfin’ now, everybody’s surfin’ now…” I added a little pizazz to the demonstration while balancing on an invisible surfboard. The Pea rolled her eyes.
I said, “You put in a quarter, choose the song you’d like, and then the whole restaurant hears it.”
The two 49 inch tall creatures shot like bullets over to their Daddy, a.k.a. The Keeper of The Money. Returning with quarters, the quest began for the Perfect Song. The Bug scrolled through the lists forward, then backward, then forward. The Pea shoved her out of the way and scrolled through the lists forward, then backward, then forward. This process repeated itself for several minutes while I drank my second cup of hot tea.
I walked back over to the jukebox, put in a quarter and typed in 3-0-0-6. I sauntered back to the husband and in true Milli Vanilli fashion, pantomimed Garth Brooks’ rendition of Shameless. The kids were not impressed. (Our waitress was…)
However, we knew the girls had struck gold when they shouted, “THEY HAVE TAYLOR SWIFT!” The two looked at each other in a moment of reverence for the singer “whose name shall be spoken a lot” at our house. The quarter clinked in, the buttons were pushed, Love Story blared. The Bug and the Pea sang like Rock Stars complete with air guitars. (There was even a bit of head-banging, which I thought a little peculiar for this particular occasion, but anyhoooooo.)
An older gentleman sitting alone, squelched a laugh and made a stellar effort NOT to shoot coffee out his nose as he absorbed the scene.
The cook headed for a well deserved smoke break.
Our waitress shared some mango flavored bubble gum, grabbed a menu, and danced over to the lone customer.
“Now, what can I get ya to eat?” she asked between chomps.
He replied: “I believe I’ll have what they’re having….”