The Common Man Diner

From the outside, this New Hampshire highway rest stop didn’t look particularly odd: just another gas-and-food place on a family road trip.
But inside, it looked like a small town from mid-20th-century America, a bold masquerade for a building — a building — with a convenience store to the near right and restrooms to the far left and an information desk at the way back. 
The food was ordered and served in fake log cabins with fake wooden signs and fake shingled roofs that faked protection from the fake blue sky and its fake cumulus clouds. A Jumbotron pretended to be the horizon, advertising NASCAR races, a golf course with fine dining and zip lining, and an outdoor adventure party! that seemed like someone else’s idea of a good time. And every once in a while, this horizon would play clips of stock footage from the boomer days saying things like “Connect With Home: Free WiFi.” or “Free Tesla E-Charging.”
Half the rest stop was a diner serving breakfast. It was designed the way I always imagined diners (they weren’t called restaurants back then) looked in the 50s. Behind the counter was an open-view grill and a sign with “Life is short. Eat dessert first!” drawn in with bright bubble letters. 
Mom and I were hungry, so we got in the rather long line, which had a surprising number of Indian people. We looked at the chalkboard menu, which was really a set of screens that looked like a chalkboard menu. The heading faked hand-drawn chalk block letters, but the body text was a clean, bold serif font — too sharp to be anything but computer generated. 
The rightmost screen had a slideshow of retro advertisements for current events at other rest stops run by “The Common Man Family.” These digital posters had signs of wear, like they had been passed down from father to son instead of Adobe Illustrator to screen. But at the bottom of the posters, not obscured by the perfectly drawn imperfections, were a series of icons: 
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest.
I walked up to the cashier, a rather pretty girl who looked about my age. Her eyeliner wasn’t particularly heavy, but it stuck out against her light skin. She said, “Hi, how are you?”
I replied, “I’m doing well, how about you?” I was a bit surprised by her friendliness, however scripted it probably was.
She said, “I’m doing well, thank you,” and I ordered a “Mt. Washington” that Mom and I would split, a coffee for Dad, and another coffee for me. She asked for my name for the order, and I instinctively said, “A.J.” — the pronunciation I used back in middle school, back when I assumed goras couldn’t say “Ajey.”
I wished her a happy Fourth of July.
Some time later (Mom thought it was too long), our Mt. Washington arrived. Two strips of bacon (salty), one sausage patty (very salty), eggs and home fries (not salted at all), two pancakes (delicious and topped with a mound of butter), and an English muffin (great with the butter we took from the pancakes). It made a filling breakfast for the two of us — honest American proportions. 
Mom didn’t enjoy the food. But I relished the taste of neon lights, whitewall tires, kisses at the drive-in theater, and every other borrowed Levittown memory I could conjure from my fragmented understanding of what it meant to be middle class in postwar America.
The Common Man Diner oozed digitally remastered nostalgia for “a better time” — a time when people had honor, God, and respect for the community, when life could only get better, when a common man could make a good living off an honest job.
That era is gone. I never saw it myself. Neither did my India-born, not-really-Gen-X parents. And looking back, with the clarity of Internet-derived hindsight, I don’t see “a better time.” I see incomplete activism, anti-Soviet paranoia, commercial imperialism, and unsafe, oversize, gas-guzzling monsters of cars. 
Yet for many Americans, the rose-tinted glasses remain, preserved by boomers who, even in their sixties and seventies, still cherish the life they led when they were seventeen. 
Granted, they don’t have the monopoly on nostalgia. My Facebook feed is festooned in pictures titled “Only 90s kids remember this!” Thursdays are now Throwback Thursdays. Surge and French Toast Crunch came back. And Pokemon games still sell, long after the franchise ran out of ideas.
What will that look like in a rest stop, fifty years later?

 
Ajey Pandey
Connect with author at
x25rules@gmail.com