Sketches of Happiness
This entry was posted on 11/21/2009 10:55 AM and is filed under Prose.
By Mark Miner
1) She was of medium height, the kind of half-cute that can experience moments of true beauty, and she was smiling now, and it worked. It was infectious. My wife and I smiled, too, and politely chatted as she rang up our order. It was a slow night, and three other cashiers were draped across chairs behind her, laughing as one recounted a truly awful relationship, how it ended badly, and had ruined her. She was smiling. Her cohorts laughed sincerely at the appropriate times, and I was sure our cashier would join them in their circle of delight after we left. Our order was not big, but two people offered to help on the way out the doors and into the warm autumn evening.
2) Her name was Annette, and she was young and gorgeous. On this my wife and I agreed. Her svelte black pants, blue-and-red uniform polo, and cap, could not be more perfectly arranged. You could see her smile, like a road flare, lighting up the drive-thru lane. The whole experience was dreamlike and inchoate, tied together only by a cheerful voice, that brilliant smile, and Annette's true and burning desire to get each and every person exactly the food they wanted, as quickly as her dear soul could. And she succeeded. On all levels, in all ways, Annette, the impossibly, refreshingly sweet carhop, succeeded in life.
3) He was enormous. Not overly fat, but wide, like a tugboat. He could very well have had a career as a tugboat, if he could have walked on water. He greeted my wife as "young lady", which might have been correct. He greeted me as "young man", which was not. He greeted the middle-aged man behind me as "young man", which was entirely delightful. His pleasure in life, as far as I could tell, consisted in making sandwiches. He wanted to know you, what you liked, what you disliked, and why. He made jokes, which were funny even if they weren't. He made friends with you over the course of a minute, and you valued him as a friend and confidant for the next two, at which time he would bid you a cheerful farewell, and you knew that you and he would be happy the next time you met.
