Beginning
back in the newspaper days I got into the habit of making Saturday breakfast
something of a treat. At first I would sleep in a bit then go out to one of
several cafes that I hit on a rotating business. Typically there was one
special dish I’d have at each place.
One of the
destinations at the time was Good Golly Miss Lolly’s, which occupied the
restaurant at the old Arabian Motel (named for the horse, not the ethnicity) in
Aptos. At some point in the early 1990s it went out of business and I moved
another restaurant into its place in the rotation.
Several
years after the demise of that establishment I was having lunch on the wharf in
Santa Cruz. On the way out I stopped at the parking booth at the entrance to
the wharf and when the woman in it and I saw each other, we locked. Each of us
knew we knew each other but it took a few seconds for the penny to drop. She
got it first.
“Miss
Lolly’s,” she said. “Bacon and cheese omelet.”
Creatures of Habit
She had of
course been one of the pleasant and efficient waitresses there, and like a New
York City bartender she could tell you what a regular customer ordered, if
nothing else. With my radio face and regular habits, I must have been easy to
remember.
From time
to time someone will ask if Quill Gordon, the protagonist in my mystery The McHenry Inheritance is anything like
me. I generally demur on that one, but in one respect the answer is a clear
yes. Gordon is a man who sticks with the tried and true, and at one point in
the book, the waitress at the local greasy spoon good-naturedly details his
predictable tendencies.
Most
people, when you come down to it, are creatures of habit to a certain degree.
One of the things I learned in the newspaper years was that our readers were
and that changes, accordingly, had to be made incrementally. People got really
upset if something changed dramatically, because they weren’t used to reading
the paper in the way they now had to.
Being a man
of habits, I’m interested in those of others. I recall being really annoyed
when I finished Neal Gabler’s otherwise excellent biography of Walter Winchell.
How on earth, I asked myself, could someone write a 700-page book about a man
who spent his life in nightclubs and not once mention what he drank?
The Benefits of Regularity
Having set
habits that are known to those you deal with can pay off. I regularly stop off
at a produce stand to buy a lemon to go with my bedtime cup of herbal tea, and
the cashiers sometimes have me rung up and my change in hand by the time I reach
the register.
These days
my Saturday treat is a stop at the donut shop in Capitola. Not to say that I’m
predictable, but I get there between 7:45 and 8 a.m. and get one with blueberry
frosting and one with white frosting and sprinkles (the type favored by Tommy
Lee Jones in The Fugitive).
A couple of
weeks ago I overslept and didn’t get there until 8:15. There were several
people ahead of me, but the lady behind the counter saw me come in, waved me
forward, and handed over a bag that had been on the shelf behind the display.
My two usual donuts were inside.
I guess you
could say she knew my habits.
