Pauline Says Eat Your Vegetables!

Pauline never let me have desert unless I had finished everything, This would not have been unusual except that I was a paying customer in her restaurant in Bellingham, Washington. Pauline was not my mom, aunt, grandma or sister. She owned a restaurant about the size of a Volkswagen bus in the town where I went to college. The fare was unexciting but hearty.Pauline served up pot roast, meatloaf, ribs and the like. The meal looked like what most of us had grown up with: some sort of meat, basic vegetables like carrot or broccoli and rice or potatoes.
The first time I ate there I made a common first timer's mistake. I finished my meatloaf and a little bit of the mashed potatoes and gravy and asked for desert. I left the steamed vegetable medley untouched.There was no response or even acknowledgment of my request. I asked again. No response. I asked again. She swiveled her head slowly around, glared at me through her cat eye glasses and snipped at me:

"You have to eat your vegetables first."

I looked at the other customers who were all stifling laughs. There was a general murmur of agreement down the length of the vinyl and chrome counter. Then the people from the two small tables squawked in agreement.They all concurred, each in their own way, that Pauline never gave anybody desert who didn't finish their desert.I was indignant. I was a paying customer after all. I had paid for my desert and I wanted my desert. But Pauline never changed for anybody, especially a young fresh faced college brat.
Well I was a rebel, bad boy, an anarchist and an alpha male but I knew when I'd been beaten. And thanks to my mother I knew when I had hit the wall of matriarchal authority. I ate my vegetables while Pauline watched. Then I got my yellow Betty Crocker style cake with chocolate frosting. I ate my cake, paid and left.
At least once a week for the rest of my college years I would eat at Pauline's Cafe. Occasionally I would  get to see another new customer endure and then transcend the initiation ritual. Some would stomp out in disgust but more often they stayed and joined the tribe.
Pauline had been a mail order bride from France who came over to the United States in the 1940's after World War II. She opened the cafe because she had no other way of making money or getting employment.That was all I knew about her story. Pauline's Cafe is no longer there and nobody seems to even remember her or the cafe.
But I remember her. She was a person who set a simple standard. She represented an archetype of a generation that set simple standards: Eat your vegetables.I wish I had Pauline on my side and in my town when I see kids walking to school with a 32 ounce soda and a doughnut for breakfast. But I'll try to carry her message somehow.