Skip to main content

The Angel at the Next Table

This is not a restaurant review. This is the tale of a hometown adventure.

My husband and I decided to try Sonoma's in Owen Brown last night. We had just enough time to have dinner before picking up our daughter from her youth group activity at the Interfaith Center. We had never eaten there, but it seemed like a no-brainer. It's right across the parking lot from OBIC.

First impressions--it's one enormous room with an excess of tevevisions. And then, the realization: we have stumbled on to the Sunday football crowd. The televisions were loud, the patrons were pleasantly boisterous. We took a table and looked around for a waitress.

There wasn't one. Well, actually, there was one waitress for the entire place and she was also tending bar. She was very friendly under the circumstances. She took our order promptly, got our drinks, and then...

We waited. And waited. And we began to worry that we wouldn't be finished in time to get our daughter. Our phones weren't picking up a signal for some reason so we couldn't text her.

I began to think that our waitress/bartender was also the cook.

My husband made an executive decision to pop over to touch base with our daughter. Almost as soon as he left, our food appeared. As I looked up to say thanks I noticed that the server wasn't our waitress but some nice woman from the table next to ours.

"I used to work here," she explained. "I'm just trying to help out."

My husband came back, we ate, asked for the check. As we finished, the mysterious woman from the next table appeared once more.

"Don't write off this place because of tonight. She's really short-handed. I worked here for years. It's really a wonderful place."

We heard her go to the waitress and say, "Take one of their sandwiches off their check and put it on my bill."

Wow. That's loyalty.

Hats off to that poor woman who was running an entire restaurant by herself yesterday. And, to the angel at the next table, thanks. We'll come back again and give Sonoma's another chance.

Maybe not during Sunday football, though.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Teacher Gifts

Today is the last day of school before the Winter Break. It’s a good time to remember the far-reaching nature of our public school system. You may not have children. You may have sent your children to independent schools. It matters not. You will be impacted one way or another. Yesterday I read a long thread on Facebook about several waves of illness in the schools right now. There’s influenza A and norovirus, I believe. And of course there’s COVID. Apparently in some individual schools the rate of illness is high enough for school admin to notify parents.  When I was little the acceptable holiday gift for a teacher was one of those lovely floral handkerchief squares. (I don’t know what it was for male teachers. They were rare in my elementary years.) These days the range of teacher gifts is wider and I have fond memories of Target gift cards which I have written about before. I think it’s safe to say that giving one’s teacher Influenza, norovirus, or COVID is not the ideal holiday...

They Can Wait

This is not a typical Saturday post. That’s because, in my community, it’s not a typical Saturday.  Oakland Mills High School, after years of deferred repair, needs massive renovation. It’s pretty simple: when you don’t fix a problem it gets bigger. The school system itself said the the OMHS school building was  "no longer conducive to learning" back in 2018.  2018 .  But Thursday the Boad of Education voted to push it out of the lineup of important projects which will be given the go-ahead to proceed soonest.  In my opinion it’s a terrible decision and sets a dangerous precedent. To explain, here’s the advocacy letter I sent in support of Oakland Mills High School. I was rather proud of it. I am writing to ask you to proceed with needed renovation at Oakland Mills High School in the most timely and comprehensive manner humanly possible. I have read the letter sent to you by the Oakland Mills Community Association and I am in complete agreement. You are extremel...

Separate and Unequal

  Remember “Separate but equal”? Remember how that really meant that Black schools languished in  broken-down buildings without adequate heat or toilet facilities, with cast-off, ragged learning materials, underfunded and largely ignored? The Supreme Court struck that down in 1954. The evidence was clear that separate was not equal. Plessy v Ferguson had led to - - no, endorsed - - deeply unequal schooling and opportunities. We tend to think of Brown v Board as being purely about racial integration. It was not.  It was about the logical consequences of segregation. And they were not, not, not equal. The ruling in 1954 didn’t transform public education for non-whites into a land of milk and honey by any means. But it articulated some essential truths in a way that made including everyone a legal precedent which could be relied upon and built upon. It was better than what came before it but it rested upon unsteady ground. It did not necessarily change the hearts or minds ...