Love at the Five and Dime
A story of music, love and diners.
When I was a child, I spent many holidays crammed into the front seat of a small red Renault Four as my mum and sister and I crawled through rural France. The Renault had some quirks, including the windows that always trapped my fingers as I slid them shut and the gear stick which had to be pulled out of the dashboard to change gear, resulting in a bruise that never quite disappeared on my leg. As we munched on poor man’s pain au chocolats - baguettes stuffed with a bar of chocolate - and watched the countryside drift by, our soundtrack was made up of two cassette tapes, played on repeat - Tracy Chapman and Nanci Griffith. My mum, a staunch feminist, was starting our musical and political education early.
Griffith, who passed away a few years ago, was a true stalwart of the country music scene in America with a voice that was one in a million. With a focus on tales of small town America, rural hardships and the eternal emotions of love and sadness, her songs are sung with a twang that stays just the right side of cliched. Some of her tracks like Late Night Grande Hotel and Anybody Can be Somebody’s Fool have the power to make me cry every single time I listen to them.
“And they’d sing, dance a little closer to me, dance a little closer now, dance a little closer tonight. Dance a little closer to me, hey it’s closing time and love’s on sale, tonight at this five and dime.”
There’s one particular track on the cassette we had, which was a live recording of a song made in 1988 called Love at the Five and Dime. The song is a classic country ballad about two school age sweethearts, Eddie and Rita, who meet when they’re young and stay together for a lifetime, dancing to the radio late every night. It’s a touching depiction of a relationship that endures a lot as it slow dances through the years. If you don’t know it, maybe stick it on now as you read the rest of this, preferably with a soda in hand.
The live version of the track has a three minute introduction given by Griffith in her thick Texan accent. She talks about her lifelong love of Woolworths’ stores, makes the sound of an elevator with her top guitar string and describes how, changing buses on her way back from school, “I always had just enough time to run into the Woolworths’ store and get myself a vanilla coke, dig through the record bin, wink at the boys and get back on the bus.” My mum and I would always chime in at the point she says “hah school” and when she describes the noise of a popcorn machine that goes “pap pap pap”. It is the perfect introduction to a song filled with youth, age, love, hope and a timeless melancholy that defies generations and geography and somehow makes you feel nostalgic for a life you’ve never lived in a country you’ve never been to.
Griffith’s music helped give me a language and currency for that country, but that language was primarily taught to me by my Dad and his lifelong love of the States. After a stint as a visiting student at Yale, he returned time and time again for conferences and personal visits, always coming back with an oversized t shirt for me emblazoned with place names like “Kennebunkport, Maine.” I was never entirely sure what he loved most, the landscapes, the sense of possibility, the wide open roads, but certainly the thing he talked most about was the food. Dad was definitely a foodie, but one that was as happy eating fries in a sports bar as he was a Michelin starred restaurant. But his true love lay in diners, and he never could say the word burger without putting a New York twist on it -
There’s one particular track on the cassette we had, which was a live recording of a song made in 1988 called Love at the Five and Dime. The song is a classic country ballad about two school age sweethearts, Eddie and Rita, who meet when they’re young and stay together for a lifetime, dancing to the radio late every night. It’s a touching depiction of a relationship that endures a lot as it slow dances through the years. If you don’t know it, maybe stick it on now as you read the rest of this, preferably with a soda in hand.
The live version of the track has a three minute introduction given by Griffith in her thick Texan accent. She talks about her lifelong love of Woolworths’ stores, makes the sound of an elevator with her top guitar string and describes how, changing buses on her way back from school, “I always had just enough time to run into the Woolworths’ store and get myself a vanilla coke, dig through the record bin, wink at the boys and get back on the bus.” My mum and I would always chime in at the point she says “hah school” and when she describes the noise of a popcorn machine that goes “pap pap pap”. It is the perfect introduction to a song filled with youth, age, love, hope and a timeless melancholy that defies generations and geography and somehow makes you feel nostalgic for a life you’ve never lived in a country you’ve never been to.
Griffith’s music helped give me a language and currency for that country, but that language was primarily taught to me by my Dad and his lifelong love of the States. After a stint as a visiting student at Yale, he returned time and time again for conferences and personal visits, always coming back with an oversized t shirt for me emblazoned with place names like “Kennebunkport, Maine.” I was never entirely sure what he loved most, the landscapes, the sense of possibility, the wide open roads, but certainly the thing he talked most about was the food. Dad was definitely a foodie, but one that was as happy eating fries in a sports bar as he was a Michelin starred restaurant. But his true love lay in diners, and he never could say the word burger without putting a New York twist on it -
boiger
One of his last trips to the States before he passed away in 2019 was a conference in Las Vegas. I don’t remember much about this conference, I imagine it was something to do with cultural studies, his area of expertise, but I do remember two things about the trip. I remember him telling me about the enormous car the hire place gave him, and his feeling like Mr Toad as he set the car into cruise control and hit the highway.
But most of all, I remember him telling me about Peggy Sue’s, a diner in a place called Yermo. A lifelong diner connoisseur, he said it was the stuff of dreams. Not particularly because of the food, but of the authenticity, the smell, the sense of history, the feeling that not that much had changed since the 50s. He loved it so much, a photograph of him nonchalantly leaning against his Mr Toad car outside the diner was set soon after his return as his Facebook profile picture. I have a copy of that photograph pinned to the noticeboard in my office. I glance up at it often throughout the day, sometimes while I’m looking at my wall planner for gaps in my schedule. Sometimes in moments when his loss hits me like a freight train, out of nowhere, the air sucked out of my lungs, before it passes and quiet normality resumes.
It was in a more absentminded moment when, thinking about my upcoming first visit to the States back in January, I glanced up at the photo. Although I knew Dad visited the diner on his Las Vegas trip, I could have sworn the diner was on the East Coast, as that’s where he’d spent more of his time Stateside. A quick Google, however, told me it was an hour or two out of LA, where, in happy coincidence, we’d be flying out of on our way home. A frantic joyful message to my girlfriend, and we had it firmly in the trip planner.
Fast forward to the end of February and we’re wrapping up a month escaping the British sog amongst the cacti of Mexico, New Mexico and Arizona. After our last night camping in the spectacular Joshua Tree National Park, watching the sun go down amongst the rocks and spiky trees that give the Park its name, we hopped in the car for the last time. A slow meandering Dodge Journey, it had a terrifying knack of not changing gears in time sending the car revving in panic but was luckily big enough for me and my girlfriend to sleep in when the Arizona nights dipped towards freezing.
After a pit stop at a car wash where we hoovered a month’s worth of crumbs and deposited guilt filled McDonald’s coffee cups into the recycling, we made one final stop. We pulled into the parking lot at Peggy Sue’s, and there, five years on from when Dad died and probably seven or eight since he visited, the sign I have seen every day in my study was suddenly in front of me. We parked up the Dodge, and Charlotte took of a photo of me, nonchalantly leaning against our own Mr Toad machine, copying Dad’s photo to a t. A brief cry and hug, and we headed inside.
Peggy Sue’s Diner and Five and Dime store sits next to the I-50 freeway, near the intriguingly named Ghost Town Road exit. The current owners have been its caretakers since the 1980s, but the original diner, with nine counter stools and three booths has existed since 1954. As you walk in through the entrance that faintly resembles a jukebox, you are greeted with what feels like a ticket booth to a cinema, and a choice to go left into the Five and Dime or right into the diner.
We headed left, and are instantly hit with an array of vintage memorabilia, trinkets, road signs galore and a large ice cream counter. After spending a while looking through the various aisles our mothers would both love, we headed back towards the diner. All three original booths in the first room are occupied. One thing you need to know about me is
I love a booth.
There’s something about the cosiness and the quintessentially American feel to them that I have always loved, and even in the UK where you more often get a banquette on only one side of the table, I will fight my dining companion for it every time. I could bore you with knowledge from my environmental psychology training that gives evolutionary reasons why we might like booths, but I’ll leave it by saying if we ever go out for dinner, I get the booth. We went round the corner and the diner opened up into several more rooms, one, joyfully with some empty booths in faded pink and turquoise leather. We hopped into one, drinking in all the details as we slid in.
There were doily straw covers, film memorabilia that covered almost every inch of the walls, a genuine Wurlitzer, a cabinet full of pies, and a mixture of tourists like ourselves and local customers. Arriving sometime between brunch and lunch time, we ordered a grilled sandwich and a slice of pie, along with two mugs of refillable filter coffee. The food was classic diner fare, but I don’t think that’s why you come to Peggy Sue’s. You come to sit in a booth, escape the stresses and strains of the modern day and imagine you are back in the 50s, with the Wurlitzer playing rock and roll in the background as you sip your Vanilla Coke and dig through the record bin, winking at the boys all the while. As I wandered around with my camera after our second cup of coffee, through the rooms of faded brown wood paneling, booths of faded brown leather and faded photographs that matched the brown decor, I was transported to the world of Eddie and Rita, the characters from Griffith’s song where we started this journey. I could almost smell the polish on Rita’s counter, and hear the squeak of Eddie’s shoes as he danced in the aisles.
But the love that I felt that day in Yermo wasn’t a romantic love. It was a love of a place, a culture, and language that I learned from Mum and Dad through the Nanci Griffith tapes and the endless anecdotes of empty roads, baseball games and where you could get the best boiger in town. A love of people, here today and lost years ago, who have shaped the very essence of who I am. A love that, much like Griffith’s songs, will defy time and space to keep on dancing long after closing time.
