My husband and I savor our Saturdays together by doing something together in the right lane of the weekend, where the slower traffic dawdles. Truth be told, we had a blue light warning on the way to breakfast Saturday, but that’s because we were humming along to Anne Murray’s Could I Have This Dance? and the one of us who was driving was lost in the moment……speeding, it turns out, through the tiny town of Molena, Georgia.
We’d decided to take the back roads and go deeper into the country instead of over to the city north or south. We needed a place with a great breakfast, an uncrowded grocery store, and a spot for birdwatching.
We knew just the place.
Woodbury, Georgia is one county west of us, and Smitty’s makes some of the best food around. Southerners can tell, too. We see the proverbial “hole in the wall” restaurant and our right foot slips from the gas pedal to the brake. A friend of ours and his brother runs Smitty’s, and they come from a long line of southern cooking.
We’d been too late for breakfast, but we caught the first lunch. My husband ordered a hamburger, and I ordered a BLTPC (Bacon, Lettuce, and Tomato with Pimento Cheese). As soon as the waitress turned to take our orders to the kitchen, we heard the rumble of motorcycles. A dozen Harley-Davidsons.
They all parked and entered the restaurant in black leather vests and motorcycle boots. This crew of bikers with head wraps pulled four tables next to us together and sat down to eat. One white woman, one black woman, five black men, and six white men did not claim separate ends of the table but sat among each other talking, sharing their observations of the beauty of their drive through the rural countryside and things they had seen. We recognized the points of their descriptions and went there in our minds, envisioning these places so familiar to us.
We listened, pretending not to eavesdrop, but we couldn’t help ourselves.
“Wouldn’t our world be a better place if we could all talk about the beauty we see every day and share moments around the table regardless of race or religion or political affiliation?” I asked my husband.
He shook his head. “Yes, that’s something we don’t see often enough. Can you get a picture?”
I snapped one on the down low and noted they were riding with a club out of Fulton County, north of us near Atlanta. When we don’t want to stare but we do want to see people or situations that interest us, that’s how we people-watch without being rude.
When we left, we admired the parked bikes. There is something about seeing a row of motorcycles that inspires me to want to get out and let the breeze blow through my hair and breathe in the fresh air of the countryside with a band of biker friends.
Give me the 3-wheeler!
Common Threads 