| 26 September 2006 Waffle Shop It is cool in the morning, as befits the season. Still warm and a little sultry, as Washington is prone to be. She is a languid city, below all the frantic motion. The latest survey reports that drivers in the District and Maryland ranks the lowest in the nation in their driving skills, though that is no surprise. The numbers may be skewed by the number of Diplomats who ply the streets, oblivious with their immunity to local and national law. There is nothing more fearsome than seeing the red-and-blue tags on a car bearing down on you, since they are obliged to follow no rules, and may do as they wish. A prudent driver will give a diplomatic car a wide berth; but that excludes the drivers from the District and Maryland, who motor to their own rhythm. You can imagine the chaos that results. The survey identified the residents of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, as having an accident once every fifteen years. The national average is right around ten. In the District, it is just over five, which as you may observe is only an average. Some people I know get sideswiped by Diplomats all the time, some of them while in their automobiles. I close my eyes when I drive downtown in the morning and just hope that everything works out. I put the car in the garage under the Bus Depot, and leave it there until it is time to join the other lemmings headed back across the Potomac in the evening. There is a way to beat traffic, and that is to get downtown early, and leave town the same way. Congress really doesn't get its first cup of coffee until nine at the earliest, and the gavel normally comes down around ten. Diplomats normally stay abed until lunchtime, so it is possible to intersect with their busy schedules only once in the course of a day, when they are headed out of the consulates and official Residences in Kalorama and Dupont to careen to the first social function of the evening. I work for a company that has a global portfolio, and that will occasionally result in a meeting set to the time on another continent. If it is by phone teleconference, I can take them in the comfort and safety of my own dining room, attired in my jimmies and bunny-slippers. That is my preference, anyway, tempered by decades of meetings that had to be held in vaults, behind guards and cipher-locks. Sometimes, though, the meetings just don't line up properly, and I have to be downtown in real clothes in the morning after one of the calls. If I works out that way, I sometimes have a chance to go out to breakfast on my own, where I get to pick the destination. There is nothing worse than a business breakfast at one of the big hotels near the office. The Hyatt across the street is typical, but they are all the same. Big buffets with big prices, and I feel obligated to fill up the plate in exchange for the exorbitant fee. Then I am sleepy right away, not having to wait until lunch for the urge to take a nap. There is nothing worse than finding myself slumped over the computer, drool on the keyboard, sleeping right until the rush hour. An early all-you-can-eat breakfast makes me feel that way all day. As it happened, there was an early meeting yesterday with nothing right behind it, not until ten. Congress is flailing around this week to impose some legislation on us before departing to start the real campaign that will go until the elections in five weeks. It seems prudent to be onsite until we get them safely out of town. I was able to listen to the meeting in the conference room and then clear off the e-mail. I called a pal and asked if he was free to go to a real breakfast, one where you order right off the menu. He said he was freer than he cared to be, and would tell me more when he saw me. We agreed to meet at the Waffle Shop on 10th Street NW in a half hour. I left my jacket hanging on the back of the door and strolled out of the glass doors to the elevators and down to the street. The Waffle Shop is not one of those chain restaurants you see by the highways all across the American South. This one is in an ancient brick building with a facade that might have looked modern back before the riots. It is located just south of what used to be Chinatown, before it became a theme park, and started out as a German enclave at the time of the Civil War. There are some historical remnants in the neighborhood north of the FBI Headquarters. Across the street is Fords Theater, where our greatest President was shot, and it is right next door to the Anderson House, where Mr. Lincoln expired. The history of the Waffle Shop is ambiguous. No one is quite certain when it started serving up eggs, nor when the classic diner matter-of-factly added Chinese to the menu. It goes back at least to the 1940s, and the fixtures place it there firmly in time. Two serpentine counters snake their way through the middle of the place to maximize the number of stools, and there are no tables. The wait staff is mostly Hispanic, though there is no rhyme or apparent reason to who is doing what to whom. The stools have seen better days, and some hand-written signs of indeterminate age are posted over the grille. The Waffle Shop attracts locals and tourists, eager to see the marksmanship demonstration at the FBI, and the place where Booth shot the President. Sometimes the street is a sea of young people in identical t-shirts. But this early in the morning, the Waffle Shop is left purely to those of us who have no choice about being downtown. I ordered coffee to start, since like the eggs, it is pretty safe. The alternative is to start with the Chinese, or a half-smoke sausage, the semi-official food of the District. But it seemed too early for that, and when my pal showed up, I could see he didn't have the appetite for it. "What's up, pal? You don't look so good." I signaled Rosa for another cup of coffee and she simultaneously acknowledged the request and assigned it a low priority. My friend sighed. "Four more people left yesterday. They either quit or got fired. You can't really tell. They make the announcement like this is a good career move for them, not like they were being thrown out of the airplane over the Pacific to save weight." "I liked the film," I said, eying Rosa speculatively. "But I'm not sure I would want to live it." "What about you? Are you OK?" If smoking was still permitted in restaurants, Rosa would have lit one up. Instead, she ambled over and poured some steaming black liquid into an old-fashioned thick-walled china cup. "They tell me I am. They tell me they like me so much I will be the last one left." "Well, that's good, isn't it?" "Why would I believe people that are going to get fired, too?" I had to mull that one over. The end of the industrial age and the rise of internationalism made keeping a job in the commercial sector a real crap-shoot. My pal was a vet, but he was smart enough to get out before the endless deployments ground him up. He didn't have a pension like I did, and his health-care was dependent on the company. He had kids and a spouse who probably was giving him a fish eye over the dinner table that was colder than Rosa's. "When will you know anything for sure?" "Don't know." His hands were shaking as he raised the coffee cup to his lips. "They make the announcements in the third week of the month. I am safe until next month at least. If I wind up as the last one, I imagine someone will call and tell me to tell myself and then escort myself down to the door." I decided against the eggs. For some reason, I discovered I just wasn't hungry. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |