Rocking Chairs on the Porch

I like Cracker Barrel. It's our go-to restaurant when we are on the road. Its service is almost always good, its associates friendly, its parking lot clean and safe, and they serve breakfast all day long.

Duane loves their biscuits and gravy and I would be willing to eat a pint of hash brown casserole at one sitting. We like looking at the stuff on the walls and either remembering them or being relieved that we don't remember them because we're not old enough.

I love buying gifts there because they're different than what you might find somewhere else. They make you think of the person you're buying for. The gift shop is often too crowded, but that makes it friendlier. The music plays in the background, but never loud. It's a talking place, a gathering place. No one looks at you funny if you pray over a meal; no one looks down on you if you don't.

They changed their logo and interior design recently, to a great deal of disapproval from many of their customers but atta-boys from the demographic they want. It is ageism at its very most blatant. I hate it. A lot.

Rachel Hurley says, "Their average customer was getting older and their relevance was disappearing faster than white sausage gravy on a hot biscuit. The people screaming about tradition seem to have conveniently forgotten that tradition doesn’t pay the bills when your target demographic is literally dying off."

Cracker Barrel is not in business to make me happy. They are in business to make money from people who are going to live longer than I am. Yet another spoke is being removed from the wheel of relevancy I keep clinging to.

Dang it all.

Evelyn Shafer, Myrtle Neterer, Gladys Neterer

The women in the picture above are my mom, my grandmother, and my aunt. Grandma--Myrtle McKissick Neterer--was born in 1888. She was a traditional wife and mother. She couldn't vote until 1920, when she undoubtedly voted for James M. Cox. I don't know that, because she considered the vote to be as private as it was important. She was ornery and opinionated and a family-over-all Lutheran.

Mom was born in 1909. She was a traditional wife and mother, too. Also opinionated. She always voted, always worked the elections. I remember her sitting at the table at night working in the books. It took a long, long time, and she was paid $20. She loved the system in those days, and she never voted a straight ticket that I know of. She voted for the person, always.

https://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16066coll63/id/2769

Aunt Gladys was a renaissance woman, born in 1919. She was single, lived in her parents' home until my widowed grandmother died, and went to work at Buescher Band in Elkhart as soon as she got out of high school. Buescher's went through some name changes, but she was still working there when she was 80. She was private enough that I don't know to this day why she was single. Which is fine--it's not my business. She was the family backbone. She is the reason that I occasionally use the term damn dummy, which in my mind is as pejorative as the effiest of the f-words.

They made differences, those three women. They worked hard and long and they loved their families. They did for others. They never hurt anyone. They were, until the days they died and long beyond, relevant.

So are all of the people who loved the Cracker Barrel that was. It is up to the company if they change their brand, if they paint over the brown walls and get rid of the guy in the old logo and take the conversation starters off the walls. But to do it because their loyal clientele are no longer relevant? Because they're going to die sooner rather than later? That's not okay at all.

Have a good week. Be nice to somebody.