PELL CITY—Cracker Barrel is quiet tonight. There are five or six tables with customers. I am tired. My wife and I have been on the road for three weeks. Five states. One hundred and fifty-two hotels. I need saturated fat.
Our waitress is named Katelin. She is young, all smiles, and wearing a brown apron.
“What can I get y’all?” she asks.
Breakfast. I am in the mood for breakfast. I love eating breakfast at night. This goes back to my childhood. It was a tradition in my house when I was a boy. Once in a blue moon, we would eat breakfast for supper.
My late father would go to great lengths to make pancakes, hash browns, cheese grits, and our house would smell like bacon even though it was almost bedtime. We called it upside-down night.
So I order eggs over easy, bacon, sausage, sliced tomatoes, biscuits, gravy, the works.
Katelin says, “No problem.”
When she leaves, she waits on two more tables with the same chipper spirit. A man and woman, for instance, are seated in
Katelin’s section. When she passes their table, she waves to them and offers a hearty greeting.
I can’t hear her words, but I can hear the friendly cadence of them. She’s probably asking something like: “How y’all doin’?” or, “You need a warm-up on coffee?” or, “Want some Coca-Cola cake?”
Katelin arrives back at our table to refill drinks and check on us. I notice that there are four stars on her apron. I’ve seen these on Cracker Barrel waitress aprons before, but I’ve never known what they stand for.
“What do the stars mean?” I ask.
“Oh, these?” she says. “We get stars when we start working here. You start with none, if you’ve been here long enough, you earn four. We call this PAR Four. I’m a PAR-four.”
I ask what being a PAR-four means.
“Well,” she says, “basically…