As most of you know, I travel a lot for work. Except for one class, I am a solo teacher, so most of the time I travel alone. One thing I do not do is sulk in my motel room at night and microwave some food or order in pizza. I get some pocket money from the state to eat a healthy dinner out and so usually, after a brief nap to help me recuperate after my travels or a day of teaching, I go out to find a place to eat.
Eating solo in a restaurant is interesting. The person welcoming you always wants to seat you at the bar. I sometimes accept that type of seating when the restaurant is full, but honestly, that is not always what I am interested in, eating my food, sitting between drinkers. I would rather sit at a table, relax, people watch, browse my phone, maybe read my kindle, and just enjoy my food.
Sometimes there are interesting folks sitting at the bar or at a table next to you, and they are willing to strike up conversation. Below I will try to retell the one that really struck me:
“I was raised by my grandmother, she was like my mother. My real mother hated me and I never knew my daddy, or at least I thought so.” That was an interesting confession from a lady I had just met in a restaurant sitting in the table next to me. I was waiting to be served my food and just greeted and struck up a conversation with her. I was teaching in town for two days and this lady, around my age, was eating alone as well. We had exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes when she threw that curve-ball at me. Wow, I decided to become an active listener and responded with “really? I assume your mother was very young and unmarried.”
I am not sure why I made that assumption, but it seemed logical to me, that is was a teenage pregnancy, but definitely an out of wedlock pregnancy. Well the floodgates opened up. Her mother was 17 when she had her; and she was the product of an affair between her mother and her mother’s sister’s husband. Her aunt and uncle (read: father) never divorced, and she never knew that her uncle was actually her father. Her mother abandoned her; she was actually somewhat hostile towards her, but appeared to stay friendly with her sister. Actually the sister knew that her husband knocked up her younger sister. My “neighbor” grew up on her grandparents farm in rural central Virginia and was raised by her loving grandmother.
She went on, as a child she would frequently visit her aunt and uncle’s home, who lived nearby. In hindsight, her uncle would treat her like his own child, little did she realize. She would sit on his lap and have fun. She had cousins around her age (actually one that was about a year older). I wondered out loud if that might have been the cause of the affair between her father and her mother, a light seem to come on in her mind, like she had never thought about that.
Eventually, when her uncle died, she learned that he was her daddy. That was 5 years ago and she has been living with that burden, ever since. She would have loved to have known that earlier in life, because she always loved him and she knew he loved her. He was special and treated her like his daughter. It seemed that her aunt liked her better than her mother. Her mother had died always hating her, or at least disliking her.
Wow, what a sad story to listen to and to hear a random stranger tell you in a random restaurant in a random city in central rural Virginia. It is a story of taking advantage of a minor, loss of a mother, love of a grandmother and of a father who could never acknowledge the fact that he was the father to a young girl who needed one. It actually is also a story of an older woman who still needed a daddy and never had one. She had tears in her eyes when she was finished telling me the story. After dinner we parted and hopefully her burden was somewhat lightened by telling me her story. It is one of the reasons why I enjoy traveling, but stories like this are disturbing to me and I need to process them. It is one of those stories that stays with you for a long time.
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