NEVER ENOUGH

2008-12-16 | 9:21 p.m.

turn down these voices inside my head

My freshman year of college my dorm was at the back corner of the campus proper, and right across the street was an IHOP. A gloriously convenient 24-hour place with clean booths and Belgian waffles.

Despite my neighbor girls working there on the graveyard shift, I didn't go in there more than a handful of times, if even that. Only one time stands out, though, so I thought I should write it down before I forgot it completely. Details are fuzzy already, so I might get things a bit wrong, but the feeling is still right.

It was the middle of the night, and there was a few of us awake for various reasons, be it insomnia or stress or studying. We decided food was in order and got into our sweats and flip flops and made the trek down two flights and across five lanes in the misty darkness. Graveyard shift is odd anywhere you happen to experience it, but in a diner (chain though it may be) you see the 'regulars'. Those quirky people who only come out at night because there are less bodies to deal with, or rather, more of the sort of people they would prefer to deal with. You also get college kids who have papers and books and a laptop spread out across a whole table and those artsy types just out of the indie theatre and in want of a place to carry on intellectual snobbery with cheap coffee or those vivrant ones in desperate need of crepes after a late-nite poetry slam.

Whatever.

So, but. Interesting people are in diners at 1:30 in the morning, which is the kind of thing I like. I was in there with one of the neighbor girls on her night off, so she was busy chatting up her coworker after he took our order and I was discreetly people-watching and musing to myself. Our waiter, his nametag said 'Spike' but I knew that wasn't his name because once I'd smiled at him and told him I really liked his name and he smiled back before explaining that it wasn't his name. Why should he be forced to give something of himself to perfect strangers just because he was serving them? They don't give anything so personal back to him, and anyway, most of them are crappy tippers. So, fake name. I understood it as primarily a safety thing, working graveyard like he did, but also as a truly personal thing.

I never asked for his real name. That was his to give or keep for himself, his choice at his leisure.

Anyway, I'm sitting there in the booth, not talking to anyone, taking in the ambience of a mostly quiet and empty diner, admiring the utter blackness of the sky outside the large windows because in Arizona nothing is tall enough (or bright enough) to obscure the stars when the oddest thing happens.

This girl a few tables over starts singing.

It's not a disturbing thing, it doesn't shatter the quiet. It's a solemn sort of thing... she does two lines by herself and then the others at her table join in for harmony and melody. They all have wonderful, soulful voices and the kind of presence to make the improptu performance carry weight. They get the first verse and chorus out, and then it just sorta stops after the first line in the second verse.

(Maybe that's all I remember hearing, or I think I heard more than they actually sang.) The girls at my table kinda giggle and give odd looks, like, "ooookaaaay... RANDOM!" The moment was broken, and I've forgotten the rest of that night, but. Yeah. That's one of the few quiet memories I have of my time in the desert. It's one of the ones that I held onto tightly and made me desperately try for a couple of years to get back to.