It was a Reagan morning.
Forget hot dogs. Forget apple pie. The true American culinary ritual is breakfast at the diner.
As I dipped the corner of my wheat toast into the sunny guts of my over-easies, I listened to the voice of America in the next booth.
"Look at me," the voice was saying, and I looked and saw a balding, mustached man going to fat beneath his jacket, “me, when I was a kid I got part-time work at a factory.”
To look at him now, you could scarcely tell that he had once sweated a factory floor, but he went on, “the pay was all right, and I was working with men, guys that had been there for thirty years. I learned from them. Important lessons, about life, about dames, about the world - about America.”
The implication was clear in his well-fed face: this work made me what I am today, a successful if spreading paragon of the American dream.
“But look,” he sighed, “at what the kids do today. There are no jobs like I had. My son works at McDonald's. For less than I made in the factory twenty years ago. And who does he work with? Not men. Kids. Kids no smarter than himself. And the adults... The only role models in that dump are the failures. I mean, what have you got going for you if you're still working in McDonald's at 25?”
I threw a pocketful of change down on the Formica - funny, how dimes and quarters accumulate the way pennies used to - and got up to face the day. It's morning in America, like Ronnie said. And we're training our kids to make Egg McMuffins.
I wonder if the Japanese like pancakes
