Ellen Airgood
I grew up on a small farm, the youngest of four children. My father was a blacksmith and a schoolteacher. For the last nineteen years I’ve been a waitress in Grand Marais, Michigan. I was twenty-five when I came to this tiny, Lake Superior town, on a camping trip with my sister, and fell in love with the man who made my cheese sandwich and chocolate malt at the local diner. We met, exchanged assessing, almost challenging gazes, and six months later we got married. I told my sister we would, on the way back to our campsite that first day. “You’re crazy,” she said worriedly. But pretty soon she grinned, shook her head, started getting into the spirit of it. “Well,” she said. “This is going to be interesting.” And it has been.
I’ve never been sorry. My husband Rick and I run a diner together, a job which is always consuming, often punishing, and hugely fulfilling. Most of what I know about maturity and compassion, not to mention story, I’ve learned from waiting tables. We work eighty to a hundred hours a week together almost year around, and one way or another we’ve faced the constant barrage of setbacks and frustrations and equipment failures that restaurant work is, the high stress and long hours. There is so much satisfaction in it, though: the goodness of hard work, the joy of feeding people a meal they love, the delight of long friendships, the pride in a job well done. All kinds of people come here from all kinds of places, and we get to meet them, to hear their stories, and pretty often we get to make them happy for the time that they are here.
This is the route I took to becoming a writer. I didn’t get an MFA or study writing in school. I could have learned about life anywhere, but fate brought me here, to the end of the earth and a tiny town that time forgot. My customers have given me good practice as a storyteller, too. It’s a matter of survival. If I can entertain people, draw them over to my side, they won’t murder me when I’m the only waitress of the floor and the cook is swamped and the wait is long and we’re out of silverware and I didn’t know the fish was gone when I took their order.
“She hunkered down, stared across the horizon. Felt the vast cold world spread out all around her and was reassured by the impersonality of it. This land--wild and serene, huge, ruthless and gentle by turns, was always unconcerned with her, small Madeline who was a tiny dot on it's landscape for a moment in time.”
“Looking out toward the open water she thought they could have floated in time, landed anywhere in the last thousand years.”
“You've given her a new lease on life.''She didn't need one. She owns life.”
“It appeared that a great part of victory--or at least survival--was simply a dogged hanging on.”
“Apartments in Crosscut weren't just depressing. They were wrist-slittingly bleak, and not quite as cheap as Madeline had imagined.”
“Madeline knew how that was. So many people had ideas of what you should and shouldn't do, but in the end you had to decide for yourself.”
“You know, people thought it was so sad that I gave up so much to take care of Emmy, but it wasn't sad. It was love, it was life.”
“She walked, and with each step she let another inch of the long furl of her expectations go. The place itself was like a steady hand, a low voice, a very old person who'd seen too much to get overexcited anymore. Stop now a minute, it said. Stop searching.”
“The Fourth was perfect. She'd make a ceremony, an event, of this. She had a bad habit of never giving ceremony its due. But sometimes life demanded ceremony. Sometimes you owed that to yourself.”
“She stroked one of the geranium's petals, inhaling its particular bitter fragrance, which she admired for its bold air of unapology.”
“It was more that he did better being busy, keeping to a routine. It helped hold the black dogs of thought at bay. Also he had learned that a person could be happy with having done the best they could under the circumstances. It didn't always have to be bright and shiny and impressive to the outside observer.”
“The basket would never make her famous or end up in a museum. The best part of it was the making of it, sitting at the table weaving while outside the lake crashed into shore and the seagulls roosted somewhere for the night and two women stopped for a moment to watch.”