<body><div><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=2Cqw5A_1Gznttj600" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=2Cqw5A_1Gznttj600" width="900" height="1110" >Pat’s Snack Bar in Morganton was packed when my mother and I walked in for lunch, the old wooden floors creaking under the noon crowd, every table taken except for two chairs at a four-top where a couple was already eating.“We don’t mind sharing,” I told Lawson Callahan, who owns Pat’s with his daughter and nephew. He led us over and pulled out the chairs.Janee and Mike Ramsey come to Pat’s most Tuesdays, she for the egg-salad sandwich (“Best in town,” she said), he for his usual cheeseburger. Both are retired, she from teaching special education, he from teaching vocational classes and driving a truck, and before we’d even ordered, they were telling us about old Morganton, the businesses that had come and gone, how Janee’s grandfather had once owned the building where we sat.Mike wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a ball cap, with wisps of snowy hair peeking out from beneath the brim, a thick mustache that swept out at the ends, and a magnificent white beard tumbling over his collar. He’d been growing that beard for nine years, and my mother couldn’t take her eyes off it.Finally, she leaned toward him. “Is it soft?”Mike smiled, eyes twinkling. “Ma’am, you can touch it.”And without hesitation, my mother reached across the table and ran her fingers through a perfect stranger’s beard.<div style="position:relative;width:100%; height:0; padding-bottom: 56.25%;"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/26N_-p5CdKA?si=G2S9Cvc7EdkwIzFP" allowfullscreen frameborder="0" style="width:100%; height:100%;top:0; left:0; position:absolute"></iframe></div>My dad had tried growing one like it (“It was hippie times,” she said), but his had come in wiry and scratchy, nothing like this. She laughed at the unexpected memory, something she hadn’t thought about in years.My dad is gone now, but I could picture him then, young and shaggy, my mother beside him pretending not to mind the scratch, the two of them with so much still ahead: a little house in Asheboro, my mother attempting stuffed Cornish hens because the wedding cookbook made them look easy, my parents assembling on Christmas Eves a dollhouse, a bicycle. All the ordinary days, most of them forgotten, until something as unlikely as a stranger’s beard shook a memory loose.We lingered over lunch, Janee and Mike listening as if they had all afternoon. The creaking floors reminded my mother of her crafts shop, the business she and my dad opened when she was just 22 years old, when they were newly married and full of plans. She talked about those early years, a time I know mostly from photographs and family stories, and as I listened, I wished we could stay a little longer.As we stood to leave, Mike reached into his shirt pocket and handed us a business card. Santa Mike, it read.At Christmastime, he explained, he puts on a red suit and appears at festivals and gatherings around town. The rest of the year, he hides in plain sight, in jeans and a ball cap.Outside, the century-old town clock chimed the hour, and my mother and I stood on the sidewalk, blinking like two people who’d wandered out of a matinee into the bright afternoon. We’d just had lunch with Santa Claus, and neither of us could quite believe it. He hadn’t come with a sack of toys, but he’d given my mother something all the same.The beard, she can attest, was real.Elizabeth Hudson</div></body>

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Pat’s Snack Bar in Morganton was packed when my mother and I walked in for lunch, the old wooden floors creaking under the noon crowd, every table taken except for two chairs at a four-top where a couple was already eating. “We don’t mind sharing,” I told Lawson Callahan,...

From Elizabeth Hudson: Party of Two

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Pat’s Snack Bar in Morganton was packed when my mother and I walked in for lunch, the old wooden floors creaking under the noon crowd, every table taken ex

From Elizabeth Hudson: Party of Two

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