Iselin, NJ on Easter Sunday:
It’s 10 PM. Easter Sunday was unbelievably cold, and it’s dropped down to about thirty-seven degrees by now. The restaurant closed half an hour ago. We’ve just settled our check. I look around and realize that the only people left eating are the line cooks. The wait staff appear to have left, and the place looks about thirty minutes away from going dark. We walk outside into the parking lot. It’s a barren and soulless lot attached to a strip mall. The strip mall probably gets a lot of traffic since it’s on Route 1, which can take you from Newark to Philadelphia in a couple of hours without paying a single toll. But at 10 PM on a Sunday night, it’s windy, cold, and empty.
A young waiter and waitress, neither of them older than 19, are outside. They’ve set up three chairs which are lined up in a row in the parking lot.
And they’re playing badminton, using the chairs as a net. They’ve got rackets and a single shuttlecock. They seem completely happy and engrossed in the friendly game.
In a suburban parking lot in New Jersey outside of a Chinese restaurant at 10 PM in five-degrees-above-freezing weather on Easter Sunday.
Gotta love it.