McDonald's Field Trip - Respond Under this post

Memory is about choice.

The act of it should be precise, like cutting the tip of your thumb with a pocketknife and saying “Remember this!”

The redder it is, the better you remember. The trick to remembering is finding the emergency in any situation, to look past the window as clear as a stream, to see the war outside, to see the signs of the picketers outside as crude weapons, pieces of wood with nails that say “No” to the Starbucks. They don’t want the Starbucks here that’s been built beside the McDonald’s Restaurant where I sit.

There is blood there: the signs lettering written with bold red markers.

On the surface, nothing seems to happen here. And if I wanted it to be so, that’s all I would remember: nothing.

My mind would be as clean as this McDonald’s Restaurant—like we imagine heaven might be. I would remember nothing if I only sat waiting for something to happen.

Someone decides to do something—I admit I wasn’t paying strict attention. One of my creative nonfiction students, Elizabeth, and perhaps another gets up and goes to the nostalgic jukebox that sits next to the wall behind us. It doesn’t work. Nothing.

Nothing moves like a glacier. The greatest emergency no one sees, bowdlerizing everything in its path. That is what the picketers outside are afraid of, but they can’t see that the movement has begun. The franchise, like a juggernaut moves eastward, toward China.

I see that my students in this creative nonfiction class are bunched together—defending themselves from barbarians: the woman with her hair shorn like a field of milkweed, the Mafioso with black leather jackets and slick hair. The Spanish girl saying “queso … mesa.”

I realize that soon my students will all be dead. Killed—bored to death. So I say, why don’t you go sit there or there or there. They say they are scared.

So I stand. I decide to look for emergences, conflict. I ask the girl at the counter how much for a cup of water. “Twenty-five cents,” she says. She reads the expression on my face. It says, ‘for a cup of water?’ Her face says ‘ridiculous ain’t it.’

She hands me a cup and whispers “Don’t worry about it.”

We are conspirators.

After I’ve gotten my ice water, I sit near a door away from the students behind a couple. I notice the man has a bad rash under his beard. He bites into a cow’s fetus, belly, cysts, cancers. I shake my head.

They know just what to do—to get people here. They give the children dolls. They put them on the walls. It’s a way of hiding the dangerous things here.

Listening to the monotonous voices, I concentrate on this moment. Then I see it. Hierarchy. Race. Gender. Ageism. Those who come in direct contact with customers are both young, female and white: the one at the drive-thru window, dressed in a clean t-shirt, the one at the register that gave me the water.

The ones in the back, the ones that sweep and wipe and clean, are all, as we have been taught to say, African-Americans.

A woman pulls an old blue Chevy up to the curb right outside the window where I sit next to the door. She waits for her order. She waits and waits. Finally she has had enough, she gets out of the car, slams the car door and throws open the door to the restaurant. Her mouth is poked out, her infected black mouth, her face is paper thin white. I think she’s been putting up with indignities all her life.

She walks in her heels stomping the floor. She’s angry but restrained. She says where’s her order. She’s been waiting for a long time.

“Oh, I’m sorry miss,” says one of the workers. Someone else gets the woman’s bag and hands it to her. “We apologize for your wait,” she says. The woman takes the bag, stomps back out, gets into her car and drives away.

There are other emergencies. A lost purse. A woman blocking the drive-thru, the angry young woman behind her who shakes her head. The man with the rolling pink stomach who doesn’t have long to live.

The next day, in class, Eric says, "Can we go somewhere more interesting on our next field trip. Nothing happened there."