I am sitting in Marie’s
on a Tuesday morning in an eastern Colorado town, sipping weak
coffee. In a few minutes, the other members of our “breakfast
thing” will show up, and we will eat and talk. I have been
doing this for two centuries. Okay, it’s been about 10 years,
but those years spanned two centuries, and I like the way two
centuries sounds.
These breakfast things can be found all
over the West. They can be ranchers in Pinedale, Wyo., downtown
business people in Ouray, Colo., farmers in Zuni, N.M. One has been
associated with the University of Colorado since the 1960s, when a
bunch of guys sat down for the first time to have breakfast
together. Walk into a lot of small-town restaurants early in the
morning, and you’re liable to find a bunch of geezers sitting
around a table. Sometimes they have to push two tables together to
hold everybody.
I have seldom seen a woman as a member of
one of these breakfast things. Women are welcome to join but they
don’t stay. I suppose it’s not a girl thing. Breakfast
things are not intentionally all male. They are not an organization
like the Royal Order of Raccoons. They are not, and never have
been, an organized anything. The only thing they have in common is
that everybody is the same sex. This is also not something young
people do. I know of one female breakfast thing, and like the one I
belong to, it has no rules. It is just a group of women lawyers who
meet in Albuquerque on Fridays. Men are welcome to join but they do
not stay, just as women do not stay in the male breakfast thing.
Many of the restaurants have a young, or not so young,
waitress, which leads some codgers to flirt. There is an unspoken
understanding that it is only flirting. In many cases the waitress
knows exactly what the old coot is going to order and brings it to
him unasked. He takes strange pride in his consistency week after
week. I can’t tell you why.
The women’s
breakfast does not include the flirting. The women in Albuquerque
act as a support group for one another and occasionally travel
together, sometimes all five or six, sometimes just two. The men
will go hiking together or to a basketball or football game; we
would never think of ourselves as a support group.
Oh,
and plentiful weak coffee. One place I saw had a rack of coffee
cups, some with names, on the wall for the “regulars.”
This doesn’t seem to be part of a breakfast thing but,
rather, for people who come in regularly, squat on a stool and have
a piece of pie and a cup of Joe. Breakfast things may not be
organized, but they’re not just any bunch that drops in
regularly, either.
The breakfast thing isn’t like a
Rotary Club breakfast because there are no minutes, no guest
speakers, no good deeds. I don’t see how restaurants can make
a lot of money from these table lizards because we sit around
talking for long periods of time swilling coffee refills. What is
curious is that the men take themselves to the diner more regularly
than they take their wives or significant others out to dinner or a
movie. This is a sore spot for their spouses and the guys know it
and do it anyway. I cannot explain it.
The reason for
these gatherings is not for the latest news or opinions that get
aired. I probably know exactly what the other men are going to say
on just about every subject, from sports, politics, stupidity,
cupidity, women, Iraq. So what is the attraction? I think
it’s a lot like hanging out with the guys on a street corner
when I was growing up in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. We weren’t members
of a gang or street punks. Just some guys. Whenever I didn’t
have anything to do, I headed for the corner and stood around
saying things like, “What’s up?”
Breakfast things are like that. The men can’t think of
anything else to do on a weekday morning. It gets them out of the
house and starts the day when they’re too old to hang out on
street corners. Roger finally comes into the restaurant and sits
down across from me. I’m glad to see him. “Hey,”
I say. “What’s up?” “Not much,” he
says. “You?”
Rob Pudim is a
contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He lives in
the Boulder area of Colorado where he writes, draws editorial
cartoons and drinks coffee.
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