The Omelette Girl

She had remarkable poise, standing there behind the vast expanse of sizzling hot griddle. She was fair complexioned with long red hair pulled back under her chef’s hat. Everyone was in love with her.

Even then, Arizona State University was a big school with some 36,000 students. Each dorm had its own dining hall and some of us living at Saguaro Hall quickly learned the cooking there was awful. It’s understandable the cook might burn the first batch of toast getting the toaster dialed in. But every single slice, of hundreds, every single morning? Ditto for pork chops at dinner, etc., etc. We started walking to the dining hall at the Student Union in the center of campus. The food there was good by any measure. The best part though was the omelettes at breakfast and watching the omelette girl do her thing.

The line of mostly guys would stretch around the room. Fascinating, that an omelette as a breakfast food is so preferred by males over females, about three to one. We would stand patiently, holding our bright red plastic trays with multiple glasses of oj and milk and bowls of fruit and whatever else. The omelette girl was all business with a dozen or so of her delicate egg creations going at once. Despite waves of heat shimmering up from the griddle, she never broke a sweat.

To one side a neat row of bowls of chopped cheese, ham, green pepper and onion sat at the ready. When it was your turn you would tell her which of the fillings you would like. She would then pour a quantity of beaten egg from a large stainless steel pitcher onto a free spot of the cooking surface and sprinkle the ingredients you chose. The omelette girl would then tend and fold the others she had going and at just the right moment slip them onto plates and hand them to the lucky recipients standing at the far end of the set up.

Each was a beautiful, glistening egg envelope custom made for you. When I got my omelette I would look back at the line and it would always be as long or longer than when I got there. Carrying my prize to a table and sitting down, I would feel lucky.

Somewhere, I hope, a woman of fifty plus years resides. When she looks back on the work she’s done in her life she thinks about omelettes. Thousands and thousands of them. She brought joy to a lot of people.

Gordon Bunker