seats. Let the flattened ketchup packets fly and the sodden crusts fall: it takes less than half an hour to wipe down the Formica and hose off the plastic at the end of each day. Until they are ready for better than Neanderthal etiquette and real, discrepant eating, children can practice their rudimentary manners and desires at McDonald’s and insult no protocol, disturb no one. After all, anyone who might be offended by the noise or the noxious combinations kids customarily make from their meals knows not to come to McDonald’s in the first place. Here there is no aesthetic to transgress against, business meeting or lovers’ tryst to contaminate, or delicate sensibility to sully no matter how much mustard is spattered or “special sauce” slopped about. At McDonald’s, there is nothing to ruin.
A third benefit of McDonald’s is that it provides a setting where divorced parents can facilitate their joint custody and exchange their kids. It is a weigh station for relationships that circumstances have forced to persist beyond the reach of love. McDonald’s is easy to locate and (a particular advantage for the father whose displacement has landed him in a different city) typically set close to the cloverleaf, so awkward meetings between estranged parents can be handled expeditiously. On Saturdays, especially, McDonald’s teems with drop-offs and getaways. In this sense, McDonald’s is a sort of roundhouse for coupling and uncoupling, where quickly and with minimum stress, families can come together and come apart.
“Your father is late again,” grumbles Mom. “Isn’t that just like him.” Fortunately, they can get a Coke or visit the Play Place while they wait.
When Dad does show up, offering explanation instead of apology, there is no need for the parents to prolong the scene or even to interfere with their child’s navigation through the massive plastic intestine in the other room. Mom took off Lauren’s tennis shoes before she entered the contraption. Dad joins the other occasional dads swarming at the orifice to collect his charge when she’s excreted. Henry Ford could have devised no smoother assembly-line logic, which also, by the way, mimics the conduction of the McDonald’s meal in its passage through many hands from order to tray. “Where should we go for lunch, Champ?” asks one weekend father, who has found his son swimming in a cage of colored whiffle balls. He speaks to him through the mesh like an attorney colluding with his client over the chances of getting him paroled. “We already ate, Dad,” he says. “I see. Well, what would you like to do next? Where would you like to go? Name it.” “Can’t I just stay here?” Like his parents, if the boy is guilty of anything, it is of loving not wisely but too well.
There is a rumor at large regarding the construction of the first McDonald’s on the moon. Needless to say, it would not be a functioning restaurant, only a hollow mock-up mounted for the glory of the imprimatur alone. There would be just the renowned logo and arches adorning a husk, those rooted commas punctuating the vacancy, interrupting the ash. It would make as firm a purchase on eternity as those other human contributions to the lunar surface do: the abandoned NASA equipment, Alan Shepard’s golf ball, a brittle, ripple-free flag. Imagine peering through a high-powered telescope at the black of space. Then suddenly, like a lost traveler starved for landmarks, starved for sustenance and company, you detect something, a flash at the farthest reach of your vision to satisfy your hunger and lift your heart—a touch of gold. And you are saved.
Well, “saved” is wrong, but you get the message. I currently live no more than an hour away from what is, in terms of square footage, the largest McDonald’s in the world. Its arches are superimposed upon the overpass of Highway 44, clamping it off and heralding the otherwise unexceptional outskirts of Vinita, Oklahoma. For devotees of McDonald’s and defenders of the tourist trade in the Sooner State, it represents a truer Gateway to the West and its mythical promise than does its more celebrated counterpart in St. Louis (where, by the way, souvenirs and concessions are both less plentiful). Long glass cases display the evolution of layouts, logos, and all the jolly products of business calculation like phylogenetic charts. Out of the primordial fifteen-cent burgers emerge hearty subspecies and once-unforeseeable strains, establishing from those humble beginnings one of the most abundant, redoubtable corporate organisms on Earth. In an isolated housing lies a concordance of all the variants that have ever issued from the ur-burger, a record of every modification that’s ever been spatula’d off the grill and every mutation that’s ever risen from the first fry vat on down to whatever it was you just devoured. Plastic heads and torsos of the company clown preside throughout the complex in unmitigatable glee; in fact, the whole garish, hyperactive, make-believe population of McDonaldland have been figured into party favors and plush toys, banks and balloons, collectibles past and yet to come on the market. They’ve rounded up the usual suspects, as it were. As so, on view through the glass walls facing east and west over I-44, are we.
“Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” Rick remarks as the two of them stroll off the tarmac, out of Casablanca’s closing scene and into our collective unconsciousness. It will occur to contemporary audiences that as good a place as any for them to dedicate their alliance might be McDonald’s. Having sacrificed Ingrid Bergman and the sanction of the occupying army between them, who better deserves a break today than these two? Undoubtedly, to stay a step ahead of the Nazi pursuit, they’d get whatever they get to go.
And so I wish our heroes safe passage and fast food. But Casablanca always did bring out the romantic in me.
3 Castaways
each scrap has a shadow—each shadow cast
by a different light.
—Sharon Olds, “The Unswept”
It should be moving water. A pond may provide the requisite serenity, and for contemplative depths a lagoon will do, but either will eventually clog with wrongdoing. Moving water, however, keeps recrimination from building by bearing it away. Tradition may respect all bodies of water equally, but because we are more effectively consoled by the sensation of opening up a distance between our selves and our sins, a river is preferable to a stew of group renunciation. Landlocked urban worshippers have to improvise by seeking out streams, creeks, or drainage canals to accommodate the ceremony. For grace is centrifugal, redemption transitive. And if even minor indiscretions need leaching out, just imagine the rinse cycle an entire race requires.
Dry seasons present special challenges. Consider the way children make miniature rafts out of Popsicle sticks to ripple down the gutters toward the sewer at the corner. In case of drought, they will create the course by running the hose. In a pinch, when cramped quarters limit the participation of larger Jewish populations or, conversely, when one finds himself marooned in Kansas and there’s not a minyan’s worth of Jews within miles, flushing one’s failings down the toilet may suffice. While such a practice lacks the dignity and conventional setting we have come to associate with holy offices, the purpose of the service may in spite of everything be preserved.
If separation and departure are the sources of assurance, airports and train stations might eventually replace the pastoral origins of this and many other ancient rituals anyway. Modern American Jews cluster in cities and must adapt. Would not the Old Testament prophets have benefited from today’s telecommunications? Would scribes have abjured the printing press for compromising the glory of the Word? There is no blasphemy inherent in taking advantage and making do.
We might remember how Herakles cleaned the Aegean stables by diverting a river’s flow to flood the floor. We might pause to think of that resultant rush of dung and muddy straw, with all the massed and baffled animals looking on, were that not the myth of another culture. Still, the principle holds true today.
Many crumble bread to cast upon the waters and lend their efforts symbolic heft. The practice not only resonates liturgically but also satisfies the ecologically minded in attendance since bread readily biodegrades. But well before that process gets under way, birds congregate along the banks to carry off the offerings. A televised contingent from Temple Sholom gathered for
