I pulled into McDonalds for dinner.  They know us at the drive through.  I pull in every morning for breakfast at 7:40 am and everyday after school at 4:10pm.  The elderly lady on the till in the morning likes to have a chat and I found out by accident that she doesn’t like to count change.  I made the mistake one morning of giving her $4.00 in quarters and she was totally thrown into a tailspin.  She sputtered at me and ticked her tongue and told me very sharply that I wasn’t meant to do that in the drive through.  As she got more worked up about it, I thought for a moment that she had started to speak in tongues because I didn’t have a clue what she was saying.  Then it dawned on me that she was trying to count the change and she was not succeeding.  It was upsetting her.  I felt terrible because she was such a friendly spirit each morning and she must have been 70+.  I would say 80+ but that doesn’t seem realistic, but it is what I have thought many times.  I have often wondered why she was working at McDonalds.  Was her pension lost in the crash when so many companies went under? Does she have to work or is she just happier spending time with people? She told me once that she likes to keep busy and sitting at home was driving her crazy.  That seemed a good enough reason to me.

One morning she reached out the window and out of the blue said, “don’t worry, things will get better.”  I presumed I must be looking very grim and so I smiled and said, “I always look on the bright side of life”, with a big chuckle, wondering if she knew Eric Idle or Monty Python, but she ticked her tongue and shooed me on.  In the drive through you don’t really have time to have a full blown conversation - just tidbits of ones that allow you to make up a whole life for the people you encounter through that little square window.  I can’t say much about the young girl that pushes the food out of the next window in the morning because she doesn’t speak English and if I ask for anything, her smile disintegrates.  I have to wonder how after so many mornings she doesn’t recognize me and know exactly what I want, but the charade continues each morning as I tell her I do not want whipped cream on my mocha frappe but I would like the chocolate drizzle and I always add please (that comes from living in England for twelve years), but every morning she gives me pepper, salt, ketchup, various sauces, another straw - everything at her fingertips to hopefully take care of my request.  The more I shake my head and try and repeat what I would like, the more flustered she becomes until a co-worker comes to the window and says, “what’s the holdup?”  I ask for the chocolate drizzle and he shakes his head and moves to the frappe machine where the drizzle is.  The poor girl always looks defeated.  We play this game every Monday through Friday and after three weeks, she is still trying to give me pepper for chocolate drizzle.  

On a side note here, don’t try asking for chocolate sauce, even though that is what the drizzle is.  It took me three months to find the word “drizzle”.  This is significant to a drive through excursion because when I would say chocolate sauce, it wasn’t understood and so I would have to explain which would sound something like this  “the dark brown stuff you put on top of the whipped cream; well, I want you to hold the whipped cream and just put the dark brown stuff on the frappe - you know the sauce.”  The reply would almost always be, “you want the whipped cream but not the drizzle.”   I would shout a little louder, “No I want the sauce and not the whipped cream.”  I would get back, “I’m not sure what  you mean.  Please pull around.”  On one particular morning, there was a very astute lady behind the till when I pulled around.  I was a little put out of joint over the chocolate sauce as I was going through this crazy routine every morning.  I looked at her and said, “I just want the chocolate sauce.  Why is that so hard to understand.  I don’t like that foamy stuff that you are calling whipped cream (you really should go to England where you can buy whipping cream and see what the real stuff tastes like).  But I do like the chocolate sauce.”  I say this very slowly and a little louder with more emphasis, “I JUST WANT THE CHOCOLATE SAUCE.”  She looked back at me as though I had drifted in from the mental ward and said, “all you have to do is ask for the chocolate drizzle - we call it chocolate DRIZZLE.  I bursted into laughing and so did she.  I thanked her profusely because I knew that I would never have another problem  with ordering the mocha frappe the way I wanted it.

The afternoon staff is more dependable, especially the lovely Indian with a hint of a mustache who has curls hanging to his waist.  You would think that would bother me in a food restaurant, but I have no time to worry because the seconds are ticking and I just want to look through the square hole; a gorgeous man smiling, calling me beautiful and asking if there is anything else.  Wow - that makes my mind wonder off the track.  This is the man that always gives me four barbeque sauces if I ask and closes his hand around mine when he passes it out the window with such reassurance in his eyes;  I could almost believe he was somehow telling me to meet him at 2:00pm in the back lot and he will make sense of the world for me.  Framed in the window, I can see sacrifice and I know this is going to sound crazy but I also see unconditional love.  When I was little my grandmother had a large photo of Jesus in her home and whenever I looked at it, I felt at peace.  All I can say here without sounding blasphemous is that there is a remarkable resemblance to that production line print serving at McDonalds in Annapolis.  

Barbeque sauce plays a significant part in our trips to McDonalds.  Nicholas likes to dip his french fries.  Our three year affair with this particular McDonalds is just across from the Annapolis Mall.  It happens to be on the road to school and back.  When Nicholas was little, I had to take alternate routes that didn’t pass a McDonalds because he wanted to stop every time the gold arches rose up.  Well given that they appear on every corner now, it wasn’t easy to find a way from point A to point B without passing one.  I couldn’t reason with him so I found ways to go around or we stopped.  But for three years, Nicholas got his wish.  It made the trip to and from school more palatable for him.  He doesn’t like school - never has and I suppose now that he is 15, he probably never will.  It was too early in the morning to fuss with cooking breakfast and even Andrew Weill says that the Egg Mcmuffin is the perfect zone meal so I never felt guilty about the morning stop (okay, I know that the Mocha Frappe is not the perfect drink but sometimes I just need it to start the day.  I didn’t get it every morning but when I got it I wanted no whipped cream - just chocolate drizzle).