Nick Slabaugh
Let me tell you about Jill’s Diner, the eggs-and-coffee place a block from my former home that served me breakfast each day for a couple of years.
It’s the kind of place that doesn’t float away thanks to the comfortable weight of many regulars. Everyone who visits too often develops a nickname of one sort or another.
I can speak only for the counter side of the house — on the other side of a cinder block wall another universe exists, with tables of regulars and occasionals who rarely associate with those of us on the counter-and-booth side.
Jill’s serves first responders, construction workers, a critter catcher, plumbers, retirees, the disabled and able-bodied, Bible studiers, phone scrollers, and kid wranglers and people like me who nail down a stool for an hour or more to do the crossword and hum along with the grill hood fan.
It’s a place of no pretense, incapable of that nonsense. The coffee mugs are an assortment of novelty gifts, branded freebies, and whatever patrons have left behind over the years. Jill steals the really good ones. Today, mine says “At my age, I’ve seen it all, done it all, and heard it all … I just can’t remember it all.”
The walls are lightly decorated with unrelated décor like a tin motorcycle, a “first dollar” gag, and a sign for a daughter’s realty business. Posters and photos are pasted up and then forgotten, seemingly forever. It’s clean here, but not shiny new; no trend dares enter, and the menu is updated as infrequently as possible.
It’s an old-fashioned family business, an old-fashioned American matriarchy, ruled with an iron fist and a raspy “Ha!” from Jill, whose seat of power is the single flattop behind the counter from which all food flows. She keeps the reprobates at her side of the counter in line with jokes and mockery, all while frying hash and crisping bacon like a gunslinger.
The three daughters sling plates, running like mad on weekends and a bit less madly in the quiet of early weekdays. They take no guff in a place full of guff. Henry, a grandkid with a hair metal aesthetic and the band to match, handles dishes in the summer; Jerry (unrelated) year-round. When it gets busy and some task needs doing, the customers often handle it themselves.
Sasha, Ashley, and Lindsey all know the regulars’ orders off the tops of their heads — Jill seems to know them well enough to have them on the flattop by the time a person walks in. Newbie Jen is still trying to learn that ancestral knowledge.
The diner is too-often closed, for weather or illness. Not that the staff seems to mind overmuch — at the first whiff of wet pavement or flake of snow, the servers cross their fingers that a thunderstorm or blizzard will take out the power, preferably for a few days.
Jill’s Diner is somehow both the platonic ideal of the American diner, and also so completely itself. Impossible to reproduce, or fully describe. Writers, politicians, and pundits are constantly trying to find America in a diner. It’s right here, but I have bad news for them: if you don’t live here, you’re not gonna get it.
Nick Slabaugh is a Columbus resident who works in cybersecurity, with degrees in computer engineering from Rose-Hulman and rhetoric and composition from Purdue University. Send comments to [email protected].
