Monday, August 2. Back To The Salt Mine. Dot's Diner. Some Corner! It's been ten days since my face has been seen at the radio station. Nobody seemed to miss me much. But I have to go in, because I must record some commercials to start tomorrow. I will be missed if I don't do those.
Afterwards, I wanted try Gott Gourmet on Magazine Street, in an effort to check out a long list of neighborhood restaurants about which I know too little. But Gott is closed on Monday. I kept going up Magazine, but all the other places on my list were closed, too.
I wound up at the red light across the street from Dot's Diner, on the corner of Jefferson Highway and Labarre Road. I haven't been there in a long time. The light turned green, and I went inside. The premises were a little on the dog-eared side. So were some of the few customers. And the menu, a scan of which showed less variety than I supposed. It's mainly burgers, sandwiches, a few platters, and the around-the-clock breakfasts.
Two of the small hamburgers (they also have big ones) come with fries in a combo platter, also available with a salad instead of the fries. Let me have it that way, I said, but to fill the potato gap, bring me an order of hash browns. What came was the combo with the fries, plus both the salad and the hash browns. They must get some strange orders here for neither the waitress or the chef to question that one. It's all so cheap I just let it go. The hash browns were the pre-fab kind, but were very good with their admixture of chopped, grilled onions, all slightly charred. The burgers were dry but passable. The fries were the ordinary kind I thought I'd avoided.
While digging through the pile, it occurred to me how large a role this intersection has played in my life. It first entered my story when, in 1965, I bicycled here every night to drop a locked bag containing several hundred dollars into the night depository at the National Bank of Commerce. Nobody working at the Time Saver on the corner of Jefferson Highway and Central Avenue (where the Blue Tomato is now--same building) had a car. They needed to deliver the night's receipts to the bank. I worked there myself, but I was only fourteen. But I didn't work nights, so I volunteered for the errand. It was a two-and-a-half-mile round trip, in the dark. For my efforts, they gave me the reimbursement the store would give employees with cars to pay for their gas used. That was a big shiny quarter. (Gas was thirty cents a gallon then.)
The bank was absorbed by the Whitney in the 1980s, but it's still open on Jefferson Highway at Labarre Road, diagonally across from where I now burrowed through the moraine of hash browns. I opened my first checking account at the NBC in 1966. That account is still open. I made my first car loan and my first business loan there. In the 1980s, the bank was a client for my odd business of producing employee newsletters for companies too busy and not skilled enough at publishing to do their own. I always seemed to be around that intersection.
I went there a lot in the 1990s, when my mother spent her final years at the Jefferson Healthcare Center. That's across the street from the bank, across the highway from Dot's. After she died there in 1996, for the first time in three decades I had no connection with the intersection anymore. Then a splinter group from the New Orleans Barbershop Chorus--of which I am a member--began going to Dot's Diner after our biweekly performances at Ochsner Hospital. We'd have late-night snacks and coffee. The management didn't mind when we started singing our old close-harmony songs in the dining room.
And here I was again.
Dot's Diner. Jefferson: 2317 Jefferson Hwy. 504-831-3861. Diner. Breakfast. Sandwiches.
