Papa's Place

So a week after my trip to North Vernon I find myself heading back to deliver a proposal to my prospect.  Verna took a couple days off work which allowed us to spend the weekend at James & Shel’s helping Dave & Whit on their addition.  Verna decided that she would go with me to North Vernon on Monday and that we could then leave to head home from there.

I dropped her off in downtown North Vernon and told her that I would pick her up in about an hour.  She went to an antique shop, an old hardware store that could have also been labeled an antique store, and also to an Army surplus store.

The Army Surplus store is where my story starts, the first part as told to me by Verna.

She goes into the Army Surplus store and finds something that she wants to buy but when she gets to the counter she realizes that she doesn’t have her wallet.  She starts laughing and the store owner gives her in inquisitive look as to what’s so funny, so she proceeds to tell him of my experience at the restaurant just down the street. 

They have quite the conversation about the time he spent in the Army, and how he enjoyed coming back to his hometown to start up his business.  He also tells about how the lady that owns the restaurant always brings extra food to the neighboring store owners.  During this conversation Verna gets my call that I’m back in town and ready to go to lunch and head home.  She comes out and gets her wallet and goes back in and settles up with him.

We then go into the Hoosier Street Grill for lunch.  The Monday special is Lasagna or Spaghetti,   The same lady that waited on me on my first visit comes to take our order and she says,  “you can have both if you want”  we both declare that would be great, as we didn’t know which we wanted.  It’s not long till we are both staring at a huge plate of delicious food of which we are doing good to eat about half of it. 

The waitress comes by with boxes so we can take it home, and just like on my previous visit she tells us that its $7 a plate and we can just leave the money on the table, when we get ready to go.  I stop her and remind her of my earlier visit.  She laughs and said “Oh we get people in here all the time who don’t have money to pay and I always tell them to come back later and pay.  Some do and some don’t”  I ask her if she is the owner, and she tells us that 12 years ago, her and her husband opened the restaurant and how much they have enjoyed having it.  The conversation then leads to how much I enjoyed my visit to North Vernon earlier, and how I was looking forward to bringing Verna with me so she could see the town also.  Then Verna tells her of her experience with not having her wallet when she went to buy something at the Army Surplus store,  and we all chuckle and I comment about how it must be something about the town that causes us to misplace our money.  We all laugh again and she finishes off our conversation with the jovial comment “Well you must be like a modern day Bonnie and Clyde coming to town to take advantage of the small town folks”