The Hardee’s Coffee Club
I’d seen them all humped over at a table slurping coffee in a mostly empty Hardee’s at 6:30 a.m. in my hometown when I ran in and ordered a bacon and egg biscuit with hash browns and a diet coke because the drive-thru had a long line, but I hadn’t expected to see a different group of old men humped over at a different Hardee’s at different towns when we traveled.
We parked, went in, ordered, and sat at the table-chair combination within ear shot of the coffee club. Each of them was pushing eighty-something and the oldest, wearing coveralls, had just turned ninety. Someone commented, “Wilbur, you don’t look a day over ninety,” and they all chuckled.
“Get your truck fixed?” someone asked him.
“Nope. Got the tire patched, but the brake light’s still out. Said they’d have to find a replacement and order it since it’s so old.” I realized his truck was the one parked diagonally, taking up two spaces. It had dings, rust, mismatched wheels, but like him, it was still running.
“Ought to call your president. See if he can give you a Social Security raise to get you a whole new set of tires.”
“Ain’t my president,” he said, hacking phlegm, his voice gurgling, and I wondered how long he had, how much longer he could dog paddle, before he sunk below, drowning in his own sinus drainage.
“This election’s gonna be a mess. Ain’t none of them my president. Our family only liked Roosevelt.” The whole coffee club nodded, like bobblehead dolls stuck on car dashboards. I found it interesting they all had political opinions, thought they knew better than presidents or anyone in Washington, and maybe they did, but they wouldn’t last a week in those shark infested waters. Their conversation reminded me of listening to my grandparents, my great aunts and uncles, and my parents commenting about Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and other presidents through the years, offering positives and negatives, from creaking rocking chairs on the wooden front porch, all the while inhaling the smell of wild honeysuckle and fanning gnats and flies, and they were all plucked from the Earth after heart attacks, strokes, and cancer just like the old men in the Hardee’s Coffee Club will be. Whether in a restaurant or a front porch, their opinions didn’t matter and didn’t make a difference. What mattered was voting and getting involved in a cause that was important, and I decided that is exactly what I would do.