Category: Mixed Messages

The restrooms are roomy and clean, and — unlike many of their competitors I could mention — there’s often a side entrance so you can gain access without having to pass before the eyes of a judgmental counter staff. McDonald’s employees don’t mind. They understand that sometimes a person needs to pee!

A McDonald’s I went to recently had a giant wall-mounted screen playing zany videos of people setting Guinness World Records. Such fun! And the PlayPlaces (think colorful plastic balls)… nothing like that when I was a kid! Now youngsters can even print out and decorate their own Happy Meals box. And even the merch: so cute! Gotta love that Hamburglar, and gotta love McDonalds!

On the macro, McD’s offers scholarships to personnel from underrepresented groups. Maybe not such a popular idea lately, but they do. And the whole Ronald McDonald House Charities thing is amazing. More than 260 of them, and all places to stay for the families of sick kids. What’s not to love? And betcha didn’t know there are 40 Care Mobile rolling clinics. Medical! Dental!

They send crews out to pick up all the greasy McDonald’s litter dropped around city parks and parking lots! Well, no, but who cares? It feeds the seagulls!

For a few years I started my workday in suburban Chicago, just a few blocks from the spot of the first McDonald’s franchise in the whole United States. It was a museum, with mannequin employees in paper hats frozen in the act of flipping burgers and frying potatoes. The sign on the Golden Arches read, hilariously, Over One Million Sold.

I love McDonald’s. I encourage everyone to stop in and say hello.

Just, for god’s sake, don’t eat the food.

On Wednesdays of junior year, I caught a ride to high school with a scrappy teen from my neighborhood named Chuck. We had been classmates since first grade, though never actual friends, but I could use the lift, and he could use the five bucks to fuel his rustbucket Chevy Impala, which barely seemed reliable enough to make it across town.

Once, on Highway 41, a guy in a Cadillac tailgaited us for a few miles then followed us into a left turn lane, stopping inches from our back bumper. Chuck shut off the engine, waited until the left turn arrow changed to green, then got out — achingly slowly — and opened the Impala’s hood.

The guy behind us was trapped by heavy passing traffic and couldn’t pull out to get by. I stayed in the car, staring straight ahead and listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Chuck kept up the car-trouble pantomime for three complete cycles of the light. Finally, he closed the hood, started the car and continued to school. All of this without a word.

A few Wednesday mornings later I stood by my front door, waiting. Pickup time came and went with no sign of Chuck. After I had missed homeroom, still waiting, I called his house. Chuck’s mother asked, was I crazy? He took his books and left to get you an hour ago.

When I finally got to school there was no sign of him, and in fact I never saw or spoke to him again. Months later I heard he had driven the Impala to Arizona to live with his equally scrappy brother, and that his mom never stopped believing I had somehow been involved in the plot.

I picture him throwing textbooks out the window as he crosses the plains, lightening his load and hoping to reach the next gas station.

Pixabay photo by Rudy and Peter Skitterians