THE GREAT GADFLY:

Over Easy

This morning, I got up way too early and got ready way too early and got on the bus way too early, so I ventured into a cavernous downtown Chicago establishment called The Old-Timer's Diner for a bite of good ol', sit-down-and-read breakfast action.

When I walked in the place, it was a classic diner tableau. A couple of weathered guys in dirty baseball caps sat at a table, hacking at something with dull steak knives, and immediately looked up at me with looks acknowledging the fact that I am not a regular.

Sitting in a booth way in the back was an ancient lady in a striped top, coffee-can beehive and thick painted-on black eyebrows. And yes, she was smoking.

Everything in the diner was thick and waxy and all the wood looked artificially dark and all the glass was amber, and the waiter's Shee-Kah-Koh accent was so damn thick, you'd have to cut into it with a chainsaw, and he called me "buddy" the whole time, which, you know, is the diner waiter version of the diner waitress' "hon". This was some old skool dining, right here. I was loving it.

I had a perfect windowseat booth, overlooking a stretch of street I stumble down every day on the way to work. How different it was to sit on the other side of the glass and watch people scramble and scurry. The stretch of downtown Chicago Loop seemed almost....quaint? "Quaint" perhaps, but I wasn't fooled. A sunny spring morning can make anything look instantly nostalgic.

It was only this morning, looking out the window at the Old-Timer's Diner, however, that I noticed a big building across the street, and how its facade was constructed to resemble the grille of a semi truck. I'd noticed the tire-shaped awnings before, but I'd never noticed the hood ornament perched upon the tippy-top of the building's facade, or the whimsical faux headlights plastered onto the building. I pass this place every day, and only just now noticed this. Kinda sad, really.

I wished this morning that I had a big box of crayons and a coloring book with lots of little details, like human anatomy or Egyptian headdresses. The smell of new crayons would have gone nicely with my blueberry pancakes and critically-anemic diner coffee. I was happy enough just reading my book and staring out the window at all the groggy, stone-faced, freshly-coiffed people scurrying to their jobs, just as I would be doing as soon as I settled up with the guy who calls me "buddy".

Even though it's just been a few hours, my memories of that place resemble poorly lit Polaroids, circa 1978. Yummy.