Paying for Breakfast

I'm just back from our Salvagetti Cycles Sunday breakfast ride - not much of a ride but ride enough on a 25-degree Denver morning.

After breakfast, we (10 of us today) never ask for separate checks; we pass the bill around and pay by cash or card, each of us indicating on the back of the check how much we owe - including tax and tip. We always err on the side of generous tips.

One of the guys mentioned that he'd been at a breakfast with a different group earlier in the week. The payment, after everyone had paid his/her share, had come up light. I'm embarrassed just typing that sentence. I'd rather pay the entire bill than sit and pass it around to see who didn't chip-in his/her share. So painful.

I thought about lessons like that one and how we absorb them. No one says, kid, always pay a bit more than you figure you owe. We watch guys or women a few years older and more worldly than us, and we figure it out.

Many of the people who taught me life lessons wore blue collars. They were guys I worked with in jobs my father found for me when I was in my teens. I don't know if my father knew that there were lessons I learned from that rough crowd that would be serving me half a century later, when I'd forgotten everything I ever learned about geometry or the Old Testament.

I don't know what I learned in my parents' home about how to behave around women, about how guys relate to guys, about how cutting in line in an Armani suit or a Mercedes-Benz is a sure sign of low class...about 1,000 things no one ever told me in so-many words.

If I did learn those things, and I hope in my heart that I did, I did not learn them at our dinner table. I learned them from guys we wouldn't have had over for dinner.