through the McDonald’s window

McDonald’s is a microcosm, I think, as I’m sitting here, with my four sugars in my coffee, watching the attractive employee with the mussed hair smoking a cigarette, pacing outside the window, watching the two construction workers discussing in simple Beckettesque lines the difficult old lady customer impossible to please with either woodworking or painting, watching the family pulling up with the camping trailer, ordering the biggest breakfasts they can get, the father with two identical copies of himself all with crew cuts and turned up noses trailing along behind, watching (still sipping my flat coffee) my reflection in the window, wondering when it was I got to be so old and stupid looking.