Say Hello to Your Mama for Me
After church last Sunday, Mother, Ray, and I drove out the highway to Helen’s Restaurant for a meat and three. Every Sunday the menu has a new sheet with this Sunday’s choices of three different meats and ten or so vegetables. The price is a bargain at $6.89. Mother’s slice of ham was literally bigger than her dinner plate. The cook folded it over to make room for her three vegetable choices!
Ray and I love the connections and relationships we observe and experience at Helen’s. It’s the Sunday gathering place for the locals.
Ray and I linger long while visiting after church, so the place is pretty full by the time we get there. We’ve always been able to find a table, except one Sunday several weeks ago, when we and one of the waitresses stood near the door and wondered what we should do. A couple at a large center table told the waitress they knew us and that we could sit with them. Ray and I were mystified, but appreciated their kindness and joined them.
“You are the ___________, aren’t you?” asked the elderly lady. The name she said was close enough to Notgrass that we knew she meant us. I replied that we were. She said that she recognized us from having visited their church. They looked vaguely familiar and soon we were chatting away about people we know who are part of that church, including Titus who works with us at Notgrass History. When they got up from their table this past Sunday, Ray and I went over to greet them. Ray got a warm handshake, and I got a hug.
I love to watch the Sunday patrons wave and smile. Some visit from table to table. Ray and I have taken to doing that ourselves. We don’t know as many people as those who have lived here all their lives, but we know a good number after our fourteen years here.
The tables at Helen’s are so close that it’s easy to meet your neighbors. Last Sunday the lady at the table beside us, whom I did not know, commented on my jacket again and again. First, she complimented it. I leaned over and told her that I got it second-hand. She confided that she used to wear many second-hand clothes years ago. Twice she told me my jacket had fallen to the floor, and, as she left, she even reminded me not to forget it! I was amused at the continuing conversation about my jacket and her concern that I would forget it. With temperatures below 20°, there wasn’t much danger of that!
The close tables also make it hard not to overhear conversations at neighboring tables. One of the sweetest ladies from our church and her daughter Susan, who is a retired school teacher, sat at another nearby table. After one of their friends stopped by for a visit, Susan said, “Say hello to your mama for me.”
Ray leaned over to me, quoted Susan’s words, and told me that he likes that expression. It is not an uncommon one in these parts.
“Say hello to your mama for me,” says so much. It says: I care about you, I care about your mama, and I care so much about you that I care about your mama.
As Mr. Rogers used to say,
“There are many ways to say, “I love you.’ There are many ways to say, ‘I care about you.'”
I love seeing that in evidence on Sundays at Helen’s.
In this is love, not that we loved God,
but that He loved us
and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
Beloved, if God so loved us,
we also ought to love one another.
1 John 4:10-11