If Northeast Ohio didn't already exist, we would have to invent it, if only to have a place to store the nation's strategic reserves of red and white checked gingham tablecloths.
It seems to be a place dreamed up by the collective consciousnesses of America, a mecca of red farmhouses, F-150s with snowplow attachments, and the most U.S. Presidents of any state. It swings politically from red to blue and back again. It sits slightly north of the South, just west of the East, and a smidgen east of the Midwest. If America were a hard working man living in a big city and fondly remembering his rural childhood, complete with white picket fences and firework shows and visits to the county fair, Ohio would be that childhood.
In the town of Middlefield, Ohio (pop. 2,694) is a place called Linda's Restaurant. You've been to Linda's, even if you haven't, because Linda's exists in every township and crossroads in the country. If there is a post office, a general store, and a bar, chances are there is a Linda's. This is Ohio. If you've been here, you've been everywhere.
You walk in to Linda's, stamping the snow or dust or red clay off your feet, and sit where you like, because it's that kind of place. No buzzers, no hostess, and no wait. (except maybe on a Saturday morning, a Sunday afternoon, or a Friday night after the game)
The menu is laminated paper, usually mass produced from a home printer or copy machine. There is a black and white photograph of Linda and her husband (George, Tommy, Bruce) along with a story of how the place came to be. Sometimes the words are obscured by some mysterious and fragrant gunk, possibly maple syrup and powdered sugar and dirt. There are always pancakes on the menu, always eggs, always potatoes, always bacon or sausage. Gravy is optional and varies from region to region, but pancakes are universal.
The word "zesty" is nowhere to be found.
Your waitress comes. She is pure rural everywhere, regardless of accent, with a strong, plain face and a web of crows feet around her eyes. She is over forty. She is either a smoker or she quit sometime in the last ten years, and she almost never needs to write down the order. Often, her name is Lucille.
She is never, and this is key, an eighteen year old girl named Tiffany or Amber. She is not a twenty six year old struggling actor named Aden. She isn't working on a screenplay. She doesn't watch Downton Abby. When she gets home, chances are she will cook dinner for her husband and go to bed exhausted while he sits with a beer and watches the golf channel. She smiles at you. She is sad but resigned.
She never offers you an appetizer (Firecracker Cheese Sticks! Exploding Onion! Jalapeno Poppers!), and she never asks if you've been there before, because she knows if you have or if you haven't. She never squats down to hear you better. Her knees are too bad and there isn't any music playing other than the ambient symphonic melody of cheap plastic glasses clinking, chairs scraping across linoleum, and the last gasps of small town newspapers being rustled and pawed and shuffled. Outside, long haul trucks passing through are an aural blend of wind and smoke and splashing slush; a Doppler Effect of chickens or televisions or ball bearings traveling to and from points unknown.
Your food arrives swimming in grease: eggs over easy or scrambled, hash-browns or home-fries, sausages as thick and knobbly as the fingers of your fellow diners, waffles with chocolate chips, blueberries buried in pancakes like nuggets of gold. You sop up the juice with toast. You never see the bottom of your coffee cup.
The people around you are old timers or old before their time, a collection of Carhartt jackets and blue jeans and hats tipped back to the crown of the head. Big men with big hands, mustaches and beards, flannel. Solid women with glasses. Blue tipped hair. The lingering aroma of tobacco and mud and snow.
You might be able to pay your ticket with a card, but chances are you have to use cash. Or, incredible, amazing, a check. On your way out, somebody coming in holds the door open for you. In and out, a steady stream of classic Americans: the kind of people politicians like to pretend that they once were. The kind of people country music used to be about. The kind of people Tom Waits used to write songs about. People with hard lives and debt and working class jobs that they hate but they do anyway. A tonic of caffeine and grease to get them on their way and through their day, chased by cheap beer and cigarettes at night.
There are other versions of Linda's, certainly. Delis in New York, taco stands in L.A., meat and two veg places in Georgia, BBQ in South Carolina. But Linda's seems to stand for them all, an amalgamation of love and sweat and callouses, the fond recollections of a country that seems to exist now, if it ever did at all, only in the dreams of it's citizens. Places like Linda's stand outside of time, and we can rest assured knowing that whatever may come, syrup will flow, bacon will be crispy, toast will never lose it's amazing properties of egg yolk absorption, and pancakes will always come in stacks of two, four, or ten, or twenty, pancakes up to the blue Ohio sky.
--Andrew--
