Thursday, March 04, 2004

Generations at a glance

The other night as I sat alone in a restaurant, reading my book and eating my dinner, something caught my eye. I looked up and for just a couple of seconds I had in my field of vision the following:

The early-twenty-something waiter being flirty with the elderly ladies at the booth across from me while a mother walked by holding the hand of her toddler who was looking up at me beaming one of those super-cutie smiles.

Restaurants are cool places because - since almost everybody eats - you are likely to find many people types there at any given time. But to have had that generational span together in one place at that moment was profound.

I have been a toddler (not that I remember it), and made someone smile by just being innocent little me. I've been an early-twenty-something, working a job that I hoped would not end up being my career (although I was never a male with a pierced tongue and eyebrow). And God willing, someday I will be an elderly lady who can still smile and flirt right back at the early-twenty-something waiter taking my order.

But for now, I'm a forty-something widow who eats alone. And that's OK.

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