My Dad can be a dangerously perceptive man. He grew up working at my grandparent's hotel in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and got really good at picking out dialects from people vacationing from across the country. Between that and his experiences traveling across the USA, he can suss people out in a second.
We pulled into a Shoney's early one morning in Georgia, close to the Florida border. We were big fans of their famous breakfast buffet and it's heaping helpings of potatoes, eggs and pork. The waitress showed us to our table and asked, " Did you want the buffet?"
This was the only thing she had said to us, but it was enough for my dad to surmise on this humble waitress's life. "She grew up in the Midwest, I bet she's out here because she married a guy in the Navy who's stationed out here. She took this job to keep herself busy because her husband is out at sea for months at a time."
We all told him he was full of shit, but when the waitress came back we ran my father's assessment by her and she asked, "What do I win?." He was right but said that she was born in Massachusetts and was raised in Indiana.
"You were close, Dad," I said.
My father said, "Did you hear what she said, I didn't say born in the Midwest, I said grew up." He was right, goddamn it.
A few years later, at a dinner after my brother's wedding, I told that story to a couple of my new Sister-in-Law's friends who my family and I had just met the day before. One of the friends (let's call her Lisa) asked my Dad, "What can you tell about us?"
He looked at them both and said, "Your husbands work very hard to keep you in a lifestyle to which you've grown accustomed." I immediately put on the "uh,oh" face thinking my father had gone a little too far out on the limb this time.
But Lisa just nodded and said, "They do a great job, too!"
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