While Waiting for Potatoes

As I waited for my potatoes and bacon to arrive, nursing my cup of coffee between my hands, I scanned the room around me.

There was a woman with her mother and one-year-old-ish twins. There was a skinny girl with sparkling sandals devouring a basket of chips and a bowl of queso as she talked to a skinny guy who laughed and smiled and had a dimple in his chin. There was a father and mother with nearly teenage daughters. There were two women talking animatedly in the corner. The kitchen door swung back and forth: lunch for another table, a cart to bus the tables with, coffee refills. A woman came in thru the side door.

The woman came in the side door, and that caught my attention. The protocol in this place is that you come in the main door and wait to be seated, but this woman had come in the side and was quite plainly scoping out a place to sit. There was a table near the corner, and when she noticed it she turned to wave in two people behind her.

A second woman pushing a wheelchair poked her head thru the door and looked at the table. But there wasn't much room for a wheelchair there. No matter, the man sitting in the wheel chair had a different plan. He had spotted a booth in the middle of that busy place, and he was pointing to it.

He rose slowly and with great effort. As the women folded the wheelchair, he proceeded to walk to the booth, his arms swinging as if he were going to loose his balance on every step, his legs lifting his limp-hanging feet as if he were learning to walk for the first time, his torso leaning to the left and then to the right, his stiff neck craned at an angle as he moved.

He walked down the aisle with his wheelchair a half-room away. He weaved between booths and tables and sat down in his chosen spot to eat. And he got there on his own.

My worries pale in comparison to what his must be. My problems are trifles next to his. My fears are nothing.

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