Pancakes

Sunday morning pancake breakfast has long been a tradition for Johnson & sons. Long ago, Mama served them up hot from the skillet, poured over with thick and amber maple. For years and years they would sit at the small blue table in the kitchen and eat hurridly before the early service at First Baptist church, before hide and seek in the Fellowship Hall, and before Papa planned out what he would build, for who, that week. Now, if it's Sunday, you can walk between the aisles of booths at the MacDonalds in Meridian, Mississippi and see them sitting there. 11 o'clock and father and son are eating their thawed-out pancakes, slowly. They don't talk much and they don't seem to really notice what they're eating. They remember Mama's pancakes instead. The smell of hot oil unfreezing potatoes is fused with the odor of disinfectant spray that wets the plastic seats. Junior sits big and tall, his BP baseball hat almost hiding the sharp, watchful eyes that never leave his father. Senior sits across the booth, small and wrinkled in a faded pair of overalls. One strap has slipped off his shoulder. Neither notices.