“‘Coffee.’  Just like that.  He grunted it.  No good morning, no may I please.…  Just ‘Coffee.’”  

“Did you ask him if we wanted it in his lap or on his head?”

Mom and I are engaged in our Saturday night ritual debriefing about Cafe day.  She waited on a new customer.  Most new customers pick up the vibe and get with the program immediately.  This guy didn’t get the rules of how we operate.

“And he’s the one who wouldn’t let you put any vegetables on his plate,” she tells me. 

He definitely didn’t get the rules.  If you order eggs for breakfast at Sap Bush, you get fresh salad greens with them.  Nobody gets out without eating their vegetables.  And they know it.  When I saw the egg order come in with Mom’s angry all caps NO VEGETABLES scrawled across it, I couldn’t help myself.  I laid the customer’s eggs in the center of a blank plate, then decorated it with ornate squiggles and swirls of salad dressing to call attention to the missing greenery.  

“And then,” she goes on, “Get this.  He gave me the finger.”

Had he given my 70-year-old mother the middle finger, no one would have blinked.  Sass isn’t itemized on the menu because it automatically accompanies everything we serve.  He gave her the index finger.  

We.  Hate. The index finger.  It’s the finger of subordination.  Waggle an index finger over a table that requires bussing and every member of my family working at the cafe will pretend they don’t see you.  I once sent Mom home to the farm for waggling an index finger at me the first year we were open.  We didn’t speak for a full 24 hours.  

Here at Sap Bush Hollow, the middle finger usually signifies either a disregard of the opposing party’s words, or a mildly aggressive admission of defeat in a verbal spar.  While it might be considered offensive in the broader culture, here it is merely an expressive outlet for releasing the steam that inevitably builds up in a family business.  All staff and family members are fluent in proper middle finger applications, and employ them with aplomb. We never gave much thought to any other hand gestures until we opened the cafe and realized the toxicity of the index finger. 

The index finger is used to order people around.  “Do this.” “Clean this.”   “Come here.”  “Stop talking to me.”   But in the years we’ve been running the cafe, we all seem to agree there’s something more offensive about it than the simple directives it suggests. The recipient of the index finger is made to feel like a peon, someone beneath everyone else.  And it changes the tone of the work we’re doing.  Our aim in our business — whether it’s on the farm or in the cafe, or at our farmers market,  is to nourish and restore.  We nourish and restore the land, the animals, and people alike.  And it’s deeply honorable work, manifested through labors that our culture has misconstrued as dishonorable:  shoveling shit, sliding fingers up livestock rectums, cleaning toilets, wiping down counters, pouring coffee, taking orders, serving meals, washing dishes.  We’re deeply proud of these labors, and our customers are often so respectful and appreciative of them, they have been found cleaning the cafe bathroom between uses, bussing tables, or standing at the dishwashing sink, anything to help keep the space clean, available and welcoming for the next person.  Their actions speak volumes: “I appreciate what you’re doing for me.”  It is deeply rewarding to be in service to such people.  

When someone brandishes an index finger at us, they deflate the magic from our work.  They emotionally throw us back to the days of the farm crisis, when school kids snickered at the farmers’ children, telling them they smelled bad; when once-prominent members of the community became invisible; when “farmer” became a synonym for “stupid loser.”  In the restaurant setting, the suggestion is that the establishment is just a pit of lower-ranking people in servitude, rather than what the origin of the word suggests — a place of restoration.  Whether they realize it or not, someone waggling that index finger suggests that what we do doesn’t matter, that it’s scut work, and that we’re beneath them.  

None of that was gonna fly with Mom.  

“What’d you do?”  I asked, my blood boiling at the thought of someone giving my mom the index finger.

“I gave him the finger back.”

“You gave him the middle finger?”

“No.  I held my index finger back up at him. I let him know he could wait ’til I was ready to deal with him.”

I’m pretty certain that we had one unhappy customer last Saturday morning.  He didn’t get what he wanted. But with Mom’s help, maybe he got what he needed.   

 

This essay concludes my active blogging season.  For the remainder of the winter I’ll be working on my newest manuscript, tentatively titled “The Radical Entrepreneur,” my first effort at a sequel to Radical Homemakers.  Special thanks go out to all of you who have signed on to support my work with monthly donations through Patreon.  Over the past few years, that patronage has enabled me to use my winter months to write a draft of my first novel, Angels & Stones.  As a thank you for that patronage, starting in January, while I’m working on my new manuscript (thanks to your support), I’ll be posting a chapter from Angels & Stones  each week until my blogging season resumes at the end of May. This novel is still in draft form; so you will be seeing raw writing.  This is an opportunity to follow my creative process and participate with me as it evolves.  

Anyone who signs on before Dec. 31 will be able to access the novel in January.  You can pay as little as $1/month to participate, or as much as $50 or $100! If you’d like to sign on as a patron to follow the story, you can do so here.

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