I am adjusting to my new life and beginning to find simple
pleasures as I step into my invisible role. That was why being a waitress was
so very hard for me way back in the beginning, the being invisible part. I
don’t need constant attention, but everyone wants to be seen, to be heard, to
have a voice and to matter. It set me on a journey of making sure people around
me are seen and loved and honored. Waitresses don’t matter. But yet we are so
vitally important. I laugh at the poor schmucks who are rude to me. If they
only knew how intricately I control the meal they are so anxious to receive and
I control their happiness in those moments they are treating me less than; all
those quiet moments I spend alone with their soup spoon. Just yesterday I
watched Carla the chain smoker with greasy bangs take a handful of fries from a
burger platter seconds before it went out to the floor. This week, I took soup
back to the chef declaring it cold. He stuck his finger in it, agreed and threw
it in the microwave. Trust me, your food is prepared with the greatest of
cynicism and don’t make me lick your spoon.
Yesterday I pulled this book from the shelf and today I read
these words:
Other, deeper lessons of restaurant work stayed with me,
informing not just my kitchen technique but the way I moved in the world. I
learned what it felt like to become invisible; When I pulled on my slightly
starch-stiff whites, the uniform changed me from an individual, with my own
tedious history, to a ritual figure, one of millions of restaurant workers,
with a time-honored predictable role. I’d learn the same thing again as a
reporter: In the middle of a riot or a battle or a government press conference,
a woman with a notebook and a pen and a determined look can go anywhere. I’d
even remember it years later in church, when I’d slip on a cassock and lose my
identity as a civilian: Wearing robes and a purposeful attitude, I could stride
though a hushed congregation without attracting the slightest attention.
But the pleasure of hiding in plain sight was just one of
the benefits I pick up from working as a cook I learned solidarity, the kind
that only comes through shared bodily experience, sweating and lifting and
hauling side by side with others. I learned from watching customers that the
rituals of even the plainest or most cynically prepared dinner could carry
unconscious messages of love and comfort. And at the end of a rush, when I sat
down with the kitchen staff and waiters, I learned how central food is to
creating human community, what eating together around a table can do. As a wise
bishop would tell me, years and years later, in words I couldn’t possibly have
grasped back then. “There’s a hunger beyond food that’s expressed in food, and
that’s why feeding is always a kind of miracle.” – Take This Bread, Sara Miles
