Cracker Barrel
a place you only visit when you’re away from home, and you don’t have a car, and it’s a three-minute walk from your Airbnb
Welcome to “Sketches of Found Family,” a collection of vignettes from my life as a single foster dad, living among a community of given and chosen family. These stories are for anyone whose family has branched out in unexpected, painful, beautiful ways. Thanks for reading!
I’ve never been to Cracker Barrel in my own town. It’s a place you only visit when you’re away from home, and you don’t have a car, and it’s a three-minute walk from your Airbnb. So the boys and I walk over on the third morning of our trip up north, and the two of them start joking about the terrible things that will happen to them there. In this “joke,” the good people of Cracker Barrel whip them and call them monkeys—and the boys think it’s hilarious.
At first I don’t understand, until repeat performances make the punch line clear: Cracker Barrel is a very white establishment.
“Do you not want to go?” I ask. “We can go other places.”
“No! We want to go!”
I never know what to do when the boys joke about their race. Sometimes they’ll perform a mock Indian chant that has them in stitches while I sit stiffly beside them. Sometimes they’ll make fun of each other’s skin tone. If I try to start a productive conversation about race, I’m in danger of being called a "white lady,” the boys’ most derogatory label. White ladies are fun-ruiners. They cook healthy food for dinner and limit their kids’ screen time.
Anyway, we walk into Cracker Barrel. The boys scan the room and bristle with giddy energy: there are only white people here.
“What are you monkeys doing here?” my younger boy whispers in a mock slave-driver voice and then laughs uncontrollably. His brother shushes him but then bursts out laughing too.
I play them in checkers while we wait to be seated, the same way my dad used to play me and my brother when we stopped here on road trips to grandma’s house. The walls around us are cluttered with sentimental old portraits of white people—farmhands and rural weddings. After a short wait we get our table and order and see how many pegs we can eliminate on that wooden triangle game you only play at Cracker Barrel. A black girl walks past us, and my younger boy makes pointed eye contact with me. I notice what he doesn’t—she is one of the kitchen staff. In fact, there are several people of color working as cooks and waiters. Other than that, we spot only one other patron who is not white, a black guy eating with his girlfriend at a two-seater by the window. I wonder if they feel their apartness too. I also wonder, as I often do, what they make of this white man and his two tan boys.
Our food arrives, a choose-your-own-adventure of brunch offerings. Our table is loaded with hash browns and eggs and burgers and fries. It is not good, but we all dig in and say how good it is.
My older boy is a practicing Muslim, so when it’s time for the third prayer of the day he wanders off to wash in the bathroom and find a place to face Mecca and bow. Probably nothing bad will happen to him, I think. He will be fine. My younger boy pours maple syrup on his pancakes and then fills the empty bottle with root beer from his cup, a prank for the next white person who comes along.
Families are always tricky to write about, all the more so when your family is involved with the foster system. Many details cannot be shared, and it’s all too easy to fixate on the sentimental or the tragic. These sketches, which are nonlinear and intentionally vague in places, are my best attempt. Taken individually, they say very little about our shared lives together. Taken as a collection, unfolding week by week, I hope they communicate something of the joy, pain, and humor of our little household.
"Lil" made me cry. This one made me laugh. The personal is indeed universal. Thanks, Josh.