American Reality

While buying a guacamole cheeseburger at a diner in Greenwich CT, the server indulged my bad Spanish and graciously explained the difference between some common Italian, Spanish and English terms. Nice.

A Guatemalan immigrant, he’s been working the kitchen trade for years. After learning English by watching television, and then working for five years in an Italian restaurant, he went from bi-lingual to tri-lingual. His fluency and depth of knowledge was impressive.

It was late and the joint was deserted so he gave us plenty of conversation and attention. I kept asking questions and he answered them all patiently and sincerely. I do that sometimes – old radio interview habits die hard and I’ve always wanted Studs Terkel’s career.

Studs said: "I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be...That's what we're missing. We're missing argument. We're missing debate. We're missing colloquy. We're missing all sorts of things. Instead, we're accepting."

I see these situations as an opportunity to set an example for my son who is growing up in a very privileged neighborhood. Kids in his world don’t often get to really talk to Americans who haven’t had all the advantages. Good people who work hard for a living.

My son has asked me about my lower middle class childhood, but it is so far removed from his own reality I don’t know how much of it can be understood. His class trip this year will be a week long vacation in Costa Rica. My only class trip was a bus ride across town to another crappy school.

I was once a kitchen helper. Making minimum wage among the minority kitchen crew was my introduction to the real world at age 16. It was hard, tedious work and the management was cruel, offensive and racist. I was the only white worker and had the least amount of experience. The experienced crew never made me feel unwelcome or anything less than a fellow victim of an angry white kitchen manager who was dumb as a stump.

The people in that kitchen, who had no reason to give me the benefit of the doubt, treated me with unusual kindness. They helped me learn at every turn and even fed me extra food, breaking the boss man’s strict rules, because they knew I might otherwise go hungry. We were all just people making minimum wage and trying to be nice to each other in an oppressive environment.

I learned a lot in that place and when I meet people like our server from Guatemala I delight in going deep to learn about their world. Survival in this economy can’t be easy for anybody and the pressures can be intense.

(While volunteering at a homeless shelter part of my work was helping people find minimum wage jobs. In my limited experience I think it may be harder today than it was when I was a kid.)

So now, I’m watching my son laugh and joke, and speak another language, with a man who made his way from a world of poverty over two thousand miles away, to find a new life in America serving meals in a town that is one of the richest in the world. American Reality.

There are a lot of really wealthy people in that town and I’ll probably never meet any of them. That is not a big deal to me. Few of them will ever meet the man in the kitchen who speaks three languages. Their loss.