To the Editor:

I ate at my favorite diner today. This time of year is Graduation Season, I saw many students eating farewell meals with college friends, crying tears of joy and nostalgia when they got up to leave. 

Interestingly, many students stopped and asked to take photographs with the waitresses before they left. The ladies happily obliged and took group selfie after group selfie. This fascinated me. The students weren’t just saying goodbye to University, they weren’t just saying goodbye to their fellow students, they were saying goodbye to the diner and the waitresses. 

When I got up to pay my bill, I stopped to speak at the register about the farewells I had been observing. The waitresses told me that for years now they have all been making conscious attempts to invest in and support college students who eat at the diner. One waitress told me of a particular student whose parents actually thanked the diner for helping their son grow socially! 

When he first started college, the student didn’t know how to fit in. When this student came to eat at the diner, he would often sit alone and was visibly lonely. Whenever he came to eat, the waitresses went out of their way to acknowledge and encourage him. When the student eventually did make friends at University, he ate with them at the diner. The waitresses celebrated and affirmed him for growing as a person! The student believes, and his parents do as well, that the waitresses were essential to his increased socialization.

This is truly astounding. These ladies have not just been serving food, they have been building Potsdam up person by person. What an amazing service of counseling and kindness these waitresses have given to countless students. 

The service is all the more wholesome and divine because it’s free but my God— is there even a price we can set on healing a human soul with love? Clarkson University, SLU, and SUNY Potsdam should be donating money to this diner for the help it has given their students. The town of Potsdam should build bronze statues of these waitresses (lovely angles that they are) to immortalize their names and their warfare against the forces of loneliness and despair.

I am proud to be a regular customer at the diner and I will now commend the establishment to you: it is the Village Diner in Potsdam, New York. 

Silas Smith
Norwood