An Atheist and a Dirndl

I was 22 years old before I had ever heard someone say they were an atheist…it wasn’t in so many words, but it was the first time I’d heard anything close to it in my life.

I was in college at the time — a non-traditional student at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith. I had already been married for four years at that point, and I had a two-year-old son.

I was also working at a restaurant. It was on the site of a winery and vineyard. I was a hostess and waitress, and I even gave a few tours of the winery when they were short-staffed. I was a great hostess and an okay server and a terrible tour guide. I had a fear of public speaking, which is strange given what pays my bills these days.

The restaurant was inside an old hand-dug cellar. A Swiss family immigrated to Arkansas in the 1880s and discovered that particular part of Arkansas was a great place to grow grapes. They started a winery and restaurant in the 1960s.

The lighting in the restaurant was very dim, and each table had a candle atop a wine bottle. The bottles had wax from dozens of other candles burned over the months dripping down the sides — there was a massive fireplace and stone walls and stone floors, and it felt like you stepped into a Bavarian inn while never leaving Arkansas.

As a server, I wore a dirndl with a fitted bodice and a lace top finished with knee-high socks and clogs. I felt like a storybook character each night, and at 22 years old, I can’t help but think the uniform helped with tips.

If I had to wear it today, I think I’d be tipped to put on a pair of pants and a turtleneck…

I loved that job and think about it often. It was never dull, and I really liked the people I worked with — especially one dishwasher in particular. She was a senior lady who had retired and went back to work in the evenings a few times a week.

I’ll call her Doris.

I remember exactly what she looked like. She had silver hair and cut it very short to her scalp. She wore a baseball hat every day. It must have been part of her uniform since she worked in the kitchen. She wore a white, short sleeve button-up shirt with jeans and black tennis shoes. She was dressed the exact same way each day. She washed mounds of dishes each shift and was often soaked through by the end of the night.

When I walked into the kitchen, she often looked up with glasses so fogged over from the steam of the dishwasher, that she pushed them down her nose to look up and talk. Her apron and shoes always sopping wet…she was never quite smiling, but never sour either.

Just tired, I think.

I liked talking to Doris. She told the truth. She talked about low wages and her jobs over the years. She talked about her husband and her kids who didn’t live close. She talked about greedy landlords and corporations. She talked about years of work that didn’t pay her enough to retire.

She was the first person I had encountered who talked about the plight of people like me. She was the first person to tell me to look around. See who is getting ahead and who is falling behind. See who is doing the work and who is benefiting from that work.

She could take your breath away with simple observations. Observations I had not put together…yet.

The restaurant was open from 11-3 for lunch and 5-10 for supper. In between shifts, most of us went home for an hour or so. We returned to the supper shift early because someone in the kitchen usually made food for the staff. We would have anything from chicken strips to Reubens to sausages and sauerkraut.

One day, before the supper shift, we sat down to eat and were visiting about a funeral many of us had recently attended. Many of the staff around the table were religious, as was I at the time, but my evangelical faith was getting shakier by the day with my reading assignments in college.

Things weren’t making sense. I couldn’t square the readings with my Evangelical teachings.

That day, over chicken strips, Doris said something I had never heard anyone say out loud. When speaking about the funeral, she said, “When they close the casket, that’s it. They shut the lid, and I hope I have done everything I wanted to do.”

Silence…

Someone at the table asked her, “What do you mean that’s it? You go to Heaven.” She responded by saying she didn’t believe in Heaven. Or Hell. And then continued to eat her supper like she had just said something no one would argue. Something like, “I like dogs.”

I felt a shock hit me. I am positive my mouth hung wide open like a confused kid. I had never heard anything like it in my life. The statement scared me, but it also made me feel calm. Doris was talking about something I wanted to ask questions about, but I was too scared to actually ask those questions.

Doris didn’t convert me in that moment, but she helped crack a window into something I would spend the next decade of my life figuring out. Something about myself.

I learned so much from her. She said something that I’ve held onto for decades. She was straightforward and truthful. She said things inside that cellar that still have a footing in my soul.

I can be religious, or I can be agnostic. Questions aren’t of the Devil…in fact, these questions were the beginning of my understanding.

She was the same working-class person that I was, and what she told me unfolded progressivism in simple terms. She was brave in a way I had never seen a woman be brave.

I had been taught that atheists were hateful. Selfish. Bad. I had been taught that progressivism was also hateful. Selfish. Bad.

I was wrong.

Doris showed me that goodness doesn’t belong to any one religion. It belongs to humanity.

She showed me that hard work deserves a living wage and to look up for the solution to my problems instead of looking at someone else working by my side.

Doris showed me the way forward through the back of a restaurant.

She was light in that dark cellar.

~Jess