The Silken Tent
My Letter to the World
July 2000
July 2, 2000
Sunday
When I finished talking with the Mahanoy City funeral director yesterday, it was not yet 9:30. I’d had only coffee before I left my house just after 7:30, and I was hungry.The main street of Mahanoy City is a long strip of State Route 54 that runs east from the interstate for about a mile until it disappears into the coal hills on its way to Hometown and Nesquehoning. The splendid Kaier Mansion, now operated as a bed and breakfast and law office, is the only single family structure on the street. The rest of the buildings are frame and siding row homes of various vintages, shops with apartments above, several of the town’s seventeen churches, some restaurants and bars, and a few gas stations with convenience store or garage attached.
The newest building seems to be a high rise (six stories) with a beautiful sign identifying it as “Mahanoy Elderly.” Across the street from this is a new Rite-Aid drug store which replaced the wonderful “Victoria Lunch,” a place so picturesque it deserves its own essay. (A hint: the bathroom was a one-seat-serves-everyone cubicle in the unfinished basement,
accessible only by wooden stairs hung with cobwebs.)In my opinion, there is no use visiting a town like this if you’re going to eat at Pizza Hut. My sister does not share this need to absorb local color, so on Friday we stopped at the Subway in Frackville. Yesterday was my chance to take in Angela’s Family Restaurant.
If you ever need an example of “a local greasy spoon,” Angela’s is it. It’s a long narrow space with the very front portion, where the cash register is, devoted to convenience store-type trade -- newspapers, milk, bread, orange juice, cigarettes, lottery tickets. There is a counter with about fifteen stools, three or four gray Formica-topped tables with vinyl padded chrome chairs, and six or so booths. A framed print of DaVinci’s Last Supper hangs over the grill, beside the local high school sports schedule.
At the end of the seating area are tables piled high with an assortment of clean folded linen -- towels, tablecloths, placemats. These piles seem to look the same year after year. The bathrooms -- two closets, actually -- are beside the linen tables, and beyond that you can see the kitchen area of the apartment that occupies the very back of the building.
The place has six clocks, and an undecorated Christmas tree and plastic poinsettia arrangements on the divider between the counter and the tables. There are no menus -- the grill man tells you what’s cooking that day (“We’re still making breakfast,” he said as I seated myself), and a woman, presumably Angela, brings it to you.
I ordered two scrambled eggs, toast, and orange juice. While not the best plate of such I’d ever had (okay -- it was in the bottom third: the eggs were a flattened mass, not fluffy), it was ... well ... the orange juice, which came in a carton, was nice and cold. Although the light was dingy, I read a little in a newspaper someone had left behind. There’s a raging controversy over the dress code at Hazleton High School (a larger town twenty miles north), with various factions all upset about saggy pants and spaghetti strap tops, and the name of the ultimate weapon (uniforms!) being whispered.
On my way out I saw a sign announcing the community-wide Independence Day prayer service to be held at 10:00 at Herman’s Park on Centre Street. Bring your own lawn chair. It was 9:55.
Herman's Park is a little area near where my mother’s house was that has not been rebuilt from the fire that destroyed the original wooden structures. It has a gazebo, some benches, flower beds, and a basketball court behind it. About fifty people were there, of whom I was the youngest except for the Boy Scout who handed me my program. Five different priests or ministers offered prayers and scripture readings. One of the readings was parts of Lincoln's second inaugural interwoven with a psalm.
There was a short homily by a priest with a Pakistani accent who identified himself as a naturalized citizen and talked about how America has lost her moral bearings and we must return to the faith and values of our fathers before we wind up like Ancient Rome and Nazi Germany.
We sang America the Beautiful, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, and The Battle Hymn of the Republic (lyrics printed on the program and intoned for us on a pitchpipe). The prayers were heartfelt and he singing was sincere. I almost started to cry at my favorite line in America: "Thine alabaster cities gleam undimmed by human tears."
It is the stuff that made America great.
That’s a cliché, of course, and I’m aware as I write this that everything I’ve said about my experience yesterday might sound condescending, as if I’m Margaret Mead recording images of the Samoans and interpreting them for everyone from the comfort of her English cottage.
My mother left Mahanoy City because she found it confining and limiting, and she established her family in what she thought was the Emerald City of the state’s capital where opportunity never knocked only once, a place my daughter and her friends think is the dullest spot on earth. I looked around at the people gathered for the Independence Day prayer service, and I knew that despite my birth and upbringing in the Emerald City, this is where I come from. I see my mother’s face in their faces and hear my grandmother’s accent in their singing.
And I sing along.
(... we don't have call waiting, call forwarding, caller ID, or "ident-a-ring." Nor do we (yet) have a fax, a special internet line, or a separate phone for my daughter. Her idea of ultimate cool is to be "instant messaging" on the web while chatting by voice on the other line, a practice I think is absurd. )
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