by Tiffany Coley

Created on: September 09, 2010

On Dining and Divinity

Sunday morning is the day of worship.  People wake up and feel the need to commune with humanity in search of a holy experience.  You’ll see them freshly ironed filing out of station wagons into church parking lots.  Or they can be observed wearing sweatpants and shuffling into the pews of diners instead for breakfast.  In the south there are two kinds of people on Sunday morning: Those who go to church and those who go to Waffle House.  The following story takes place in Colorado, a place more lenient when it comes to the line between God and maple sausage links.  

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And what of the maker?   I saw her shimmy in through the double glass doors of an unremarkable restaurant, the only place to eat for miles on the Poudre River.  Our eager rafting crew clustered around the entrance on Sunday at 7 a.m. sharp, ready to get out of the fog and into a squeaky plastic booth for breakfast.  A disinterested, heavily mustached maitre’ de in cowboy boots undid the latch and silently beckoned us to sit anywhere we liked.  The initial creaking and adjusting of body weight on the spring loaded bench seats had just died down when I observed her entrance.   She was child sized, a Vietnamese woman wearing sunglasses that swallowed her eye sockets and the highest heels I’d ever seen a woman walk in.  Mr. Mustachio twitched a little as he held open the door and let her pass on to what could only be the kitchen.  She had purpose.  She had style.  She had to be the only Asian I’d seen in days camping in Northwest Colorado. 

And what of the dining room?  Fake outdoorsy memorabilia reminiscent of a truck stop covered the walls in asymmetrical arrangements.  There were plastic antlers and bad replicas of Native American art.  The carpet was deep brownish maroon.  Some engineer had it in mind to minimize dirt and damage with the help of strategic plastic runners.  T-shirts were available in odd colors for five dollars, though I still don’t quite understand what they commemorated.  The lighting was inadequate, the legroom was impossible.  One other

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