For several months I've been dipping into Julia Child's book My Life In France. It's one of my Kindle books and I find I usually read it on the BlackBerry application (e.g., waiting rooms, queues, waiting for the hot water to get from the boiler on the far side of the house to the shower in my bathroom, etc.). I've always enjoyed Mrs. Child's wild-child attitude toward the culinary arts and her book has truly engaged my fancy. As you might expect, she goes on at great length about the places she and her beloved husband ate, what they ate, and how marvelous or mediocre it was (even France has less than stellar moments ...). I mention all this because yesterday I had cause to be in a Hardee's at an ungodly hour of the morning and overheard a conversation which called Julia to mind.

For those of you who haven't had the unalloyed treat of eating at a Hardee's, let me tell you that you have missed one of the great cultural experiences of the rural South. I do not refer to the cuisine, but rather to the lovely people you can meet and/or overhear there. Hardee's is on a par with McDonald's, Jack-In-the-Box, Burger King, etc. They do a line of breakfast biscuits with all manner of grease, plastic eggs, pork-like products, and anything else you can imagine that will cause your heart to clog and stop sooner rather than later. Upon placing your order you will always be asked whether you wish to upsize the amount of cholesterol you are ingesting. I can attest to this because I always get one or another of these dreadful things and enjoy every last crumb of it (I do not, however, upsize anything). More to the point of this journal entry, though, is the cultural aspect of Hardee's. Anyone who has ever run for elected political office will tell you that the shakers and movers of the last generation, in all their gray glory, can be found most mornings from around 6:00 a.m. until around 9:00 a.m. at their local Hardee's. One would not be wise to fail to plow this fertile field of opinion and good will. That said, in off years it is marvelous good fun to frequent Hardee's in the early hours just to hear what Common Wisdom is saying. A cup of coffee and a note pad will serve you well. Especially if you are a "Yankee" who has only been in the area for nearly a couple of decades.

I had gone to my veterinarian's clinic first thing in the morning to collect even more special formula canned food for my ailing population of companion dogs. As it happened, Madame Vet was not yet in when I got there. Since I really needed to talk to her about the current plague sweeping through the fur family, I had a choice of sitting quietly in the waiting room of the clinic or going out to get something to eat and coming back. I chose the latter. And so it was I found myself at Hardee's in the early morning. Weekend mornings at Hardee's are different than weekday mornings. It was one of the days of a holiday weekend, so the normal rules for anything did not apply. I, for example, was sporting a ball cap with a ponytail pulled through the back, no makeup, jeans, sneakers and my completely comfortable but ghastly looking purple parka. Fortunately, my appearance wasn't out of the ordinary for a weekend morning at Hardee's. I was standing in line to place my order when two young men queued up behind me. They looked to be about 20, with the slenderness that seems to belong to that age. One had long hair tied into a ponytail and both were wearing the regulation ball caps and camouflage that marked them as Good Ol' Boys in that making.  What caught my attention was the conversation between them regarding their breakfast choices. The young man immediately behind me was reading the menu on the wall aloud to his companion and accompanying the reading with his critical evaluation of each offering. It struck me as being a charming variation on Julia's life in France. With regard to one of the offerings, which included pancakes and sausage, the verdict was, "Really good. You should try it." But for one of the meals that the American Heart Association has placed on it's Top Ten Foods To Avoid (unless you want to die next year), his gourmandly assessment was that it was, "Totally awesome." And was this all so very different than Julia's stories of her life with Paul in France immediately after their marriage? Sharing a meal with a friend is, no matter where you are doing it, an act of community not to be taken lightly. So, Paris, France or rural South, United States ~ food taken with friends is all of a muchness.

I sat at my solitary table munching through my lovely, greasy breakfast biscuit. I was on the far side of a half wall from the Good Ol' Boys and could not see most of them, although I could hear them. I had walked past them with my tray to get to my table, so I knew who most of them were. They nodded their heads in greeting as I passed, then, I suspect, promptly forgot about me as I disappeared on the other side of the wall. This is as it should be; I am not one of them. A woman who is Not From Around Here, one whose job puts her on the far side of some fence, single, on the down side of Middle Age and who talks kinda funny. What I found so fascinating, though, was that although I know many of these men as articulate, professional, formally educated men in the work-a-day world, when at Hardee's on an early weekend morning, they all fell into that particularly opaque patois common to the cracker barrel or potbelly stove at the local hardware store. Except that all of those places have closed down, so they now come to Hardee's instead. Sitting there at my corner table listening to them, I honestly could not understand two or three words in ten. I don't know if it was the accent or the idiom, but had they been speaking to me I would constantly have been saying, "Sorry? Didn't catch that." The two young men who had been behind me in line at the counter went to sit with the Good Ol' Boys. They slid effortlessly into the conversation. It was interesting to watch the younger men paying their respect to the older ones in the terms of address and to hear the older ones instructing by example how one observes the social niceties of early morning male conversation.

I suppose a bunch of women would have their own methods of subtle conversation and communication. But you just don't see us out at Hardee's at that hour in battalion strength. I suspect we are at home feeding the young 'uns and getting the laundry started ... (you are expected to smile at this point).

"Old age, if it's nothing else, should at least be theatrical, don't you think?" (Martha Grimes, The Old Contemptibles)