France (and most of the continent) have their cafes. Britain and Ireland have their pubs. I love 'em all but I'd put a good American diner alongside them. Unlike fancy brunch places, they're democratic. Everyone is welcome. Tom Petty said he loved diners when he was young because if you could scrape together enough money for a cup of coffee, you could stay as long as you wanted and no one would bother you.

My first job was as a dishwasher in a diner at 14. Within a couple of years I worked my way up to short-order cook -- the American dream, social mobility! I worked from 5 am to 1 pm every Saturday and Sunday all the way through high school. All the lessons I learned at that job have served me well in every workplace for the past forty years. There was a guy who used to come in and sit at the counter all day, mumble to himself and read the Boston Herald, scribbling all over it with a pencil. The manager, a woman in her late twenties (who seemed incredibly old to me), told me, "Give him coffee and don't charge him for it." If the owner came in she would make a show of charging the guy for his coffee but take the money from our tip jar to pay for it. Near closing time we'd give him the muffins we were going to throw out at the end of the day. One day I asked her what his story was. She told me, "He was 'over there' [Vietnam]. My dad was, too." That's all she said and we never charged him nor made him move even when people were waiting for seats.

A couple of weeks ago I went down to an historic site in rural Virginia to give a talk. I got a train from Alexandria to the nearest town, a small place in central Virginia, quite quaint without tipping over the line to twee. There's a massive cemetery near the train station. With some time to kill, I went to have a look. Established in 1867, military veterans (and their spouses) are entitled to burial there. The US doesn't do a very good job of looking after its veterans while they're alive but it does right by them in death. It's beautifully maintained. I had the place to myself because it was 9:00 on a Sunday morning. The center of the cemetery consists of hundreds of Civil War-era graves -- a quick Google search revealed there are c. 1300 buried there, 900 of whom are unidentified. On the rail line between Washington and Richmond, the town changed hands several times during the war. There were uniform rows of headstones punctuated by larger monuments erected by states: New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Massachusetts, Maine, etc., to honor their soldiers. One of the few individual markers that was different (larger) than the rest was for an officer from Massachusetts. His stone had his biography on it (unlike the rest) that mentioned that he went to Harvard. I chuckled to myself, "Harvard people. They always tell you they went to Harvard, even in death."

It began to rain while I was there. It was really a soaking rain that came on quite suddenly. I made my way to a diner on Main Street and found a seat at the counter. It's antisocial to occupy a booth or table as a solo customer at a busy time like Sunday morning. I'd never been there before but I felt like I had because that's how diners are. It's like going to mass at an unfamiliar church. You haven't been there before but you know what to expect and what to do. It had the Sunday morning buzz, young couples, families of all ages and backgrounds coming in after church, groups of friends. The usual diner fare was on offer, with some regional variations -- grits, biscuits and gravy, Virginia ham. My server was a young woman, maybe late high school or first year of uni working a summer job. Rather than the usual "honey," "sweetheart," or "darling," that older waitresses greet everyone with, I got a lot of "sir" to remind me of how old I am. Because I speak diner (it's like knowing the liturgy) I was able to order without the menu -- "two over easy, corned beef hash and a side of home fries, no toast." Of course I made the mistake of ordering [hot] tea and got the usual sad bag floating in a mug of tepid water. The tea in this country is an abomination, but that's a subject for a different day. (The high school kid who was refilling everyone's endless cups of coffee would occasionally approach me with a pot of warm water, offering me a refill to revive my sad, soggy, bag. I declined.) Waiting to dry out, reflecting on the cemetery, listening to the background chatter of the diner (no music) was really satisfying.

I got an Uber to the site and did my talk. (There was a bit of drama because the Uber driver almost ran out of petrol and I had to borrow a hair dryer and iron to dry my clothes and try to make myself presentable.) A couple I know who were at the event offered me a ride back to get the evening train (even though it was twenty miles out of their way). We wanted to have a quick bite before I caught my train. Everything was closed except the diner. It was very quiet. There was a group of high school kids, Goths by their clothing and world weariness, hanging out. Another couple of guys were sitting at the counter eating burgers. There was a skeleton crew on duty. An old white woman was working the grill and training a young Black guy, who was also doing the dishes, to cook. The woman in charge was a Latina in her early 40s, who owned the place. There was also a young girl, obviously her daughter, helping out. The girl gave us our menus and iced tea. She kept coming back to ask us if we wanted refills. Clearly that was what she had been authorized to do, and she took that responsibility very seriously. When we finished I went to the till to pay and chatted with the girl. She didn't know how to work the register so I had to wait for her mother who was waiting on another table. It wasn't busy but the woman had her hands full. I asked the girl if working at the diner was her summer job. She said, "No, I'm too young. I just came in to help my mom so she wouldn't be alone tonight." She told me that she's going to be in 8th grade (P6/S1 in Britain) when school starts, making her 12 or 13, and said that English is her favorite subject in school and that she loves to read and write. Her mum came to ring me up, apologizing for keeping me waiting. I said, "No problem, I've enjoyed speaking to your daughter. She's a great kid. You must be very proud." She gave me a mom look, looked at her daughter, smiled and nodded. I thought, "This is either the sweetest moment I've witnessed in a very long time or they're unbelievably gifted grifters because I'm giving them a f$%£ing huge tip."

When I got to the station to wait for the 19:53 local from Roanoke to Boston (a sixteen hour trip from start to finish if it's on time) it began to rain again. A small group of us huddled under a roof on the platform. I was next to a guy in his forties who asked me where he could get the southbound train. He had a deep brown tan, the kind you don't get at the beach, but you get from working outside every day in the South.

He told me that he was going to Georgia. He had an accent that was barely intelligible to me. The line from Tom Petty's (again!) "Southern Accents" came to mind, "The young 'uns call it country, the Yankees call it dumb." I have no idea how or why he ended up in the middle of nowhere in Virginia in the rain on a Sunday night but he was at something of a loss because his train had been delayed. There was no information on offer--to call it a station would be an exaggeration, it really was just a platform. I asked him if he had the Amtrak app. He said, "I'm not very good with apps and such." He handed me his phone and showed me his ticket. I got on the app and found out that his train was delayed by 90 minutes and wouldn't arrive until 20:20. Unfortunately there wasn't really anyplace to go and wait and rain was getting worse so sheltering on the platform was the only option. We chatted--the weather, the surprising resurgence of the Boston Red Sox over the past month, but no politics--before my train arrived. I suspect he was MAGA. The wallpaper on his phone was an American flag and eagle and he had the Truth Social (Trump's social media) app. I thought, "I wonder what he makes of me: weird Lloyd Grossman-half-New England-half-undergraduate-who's-spent-a-semester-in-Britain accent; Red Sox hat; wearing a blazer in the pouring rain on a Sunday night?" Dusk was approaching but we were still in sight of the cemetery where men like us, Yankees and Southerners, who killed each in their hundreds of thousands six generations ago, were buried. Happily, the future belongs to that girl with the Mesoamerican face and the American accent who loves her mum, reading and writing, and not old men like us. We were just two strangers waiting for trains. When mine came, he said, "Thanks for your help. I appreciate you. God bless you, brother." I smiled and said, "Good luck getting home."

Here's hoping we all get home.