Poppy Cedes

Where I work there are a number of food carts available to us for breakfast and lunchtime. This is very convenient for those of us who are constantly on the go between office locations. I enjoy frequenting a particular cart, a deli cart, at which I always (ok, 99.9% of the time) purchase a veggie sub with hot peppers, swiss, all the veggies (tomatoes, lettuce, onions, green peppers, and pickles), mayo, oil and oregano, and pepper. I’ve eaten at this cart for years and years and years, known the people who run the cart for about 15 years now.

I always do very light small talk with the people in the cart, but now… it’s just different. At the end of last winter Pam’s cancer, which had been in remission, returned and she became very sick. She was out for a few months while she went through treatment. When she came back to work she was a shell of her former self. And then it got worse. Her son broke up with his long time girlfriend, the one Pam and her husband thought their son would marry, then shortly after was in a fatal car crash. There is barely any Pam left now. She goes through the motions of life, but only because her hands cannot be idle. Her spirit is broken and there is no time soon that it will be even a little mended. Her husband seems to be his same boisterous self, putting on a good show, but sometimes I end up with a tuna fish or turkey sandwich and I don’t have the heart to give it back.

Today the cart is missing because the season has changed. Pam and her husband won’t be back until the spring, if they’re back at all. I really wouldn’t blame them if they didn’t come back.

I have no idea why, but this morning when I walked by where the cart “should be” I was reminded of one of my favorite shows as a kid, “Rags to Riches,” starring the lovely Tisha Campbell of “Martin” fame. In case you don’t remember or never heard of this show, the plot from Wikipedia:

It starred Joseph Bologna as Nick Foley, a businessman with a playboy lifestyle. He wanted to develop a family man image so he took in a group of six orphaned girls, moving them into his mansion in Bel-Air, California, which he shares with his butler Clapper (Douglas Seale). Originally, he did not plan for the children to remain with him for the long term. However, he became fond of them and decided to keep them all. The show was different from the regular comedy-drama in that the cast would often burst into song to help explain their feelings or move along the plot. Very often, the songs the cast sang would be covers of various hits from the 1960s.

The best part of the show, in my humblest of opinions, is that the six adopted girls all decide it’d be a great idea to buy a food truck and serve food as a job. They live in Bel-Air, they are now wealthy because their father is wealthy, but they still decide they want to serve food to their peers. And Tisha Campbell is the leader of this pack and breaks out into song randomly, and I can’t help but think this is the only reason why anyone knows who she is. (Wait, does anyone know who she is? Or is it just me?) I cannot find footage of that awesome food truck, but here’s Tisha and the gang in all their glory, randomly singing:

It’s ok to sing along.

PS – One of my worst fears in life is having people randomly sing at me, so it would never work out for me to actually hang with these girls.