Two Things I Learned in the Drive-Thru Last Week

Normally, in a fast-food drive-thru, the only thing I really learn (or the only thing I already know that is confirmed) is this: People can be jerks. But ... I've also learned patience (sort of) and a more comprehensive (and deep) appreciation for the folks who work the microphones and the service window(s): What they endure ...!

Anyway, last week, at two different establishments (both supplying us with our evening fix of Diet Coke), I learned two different things--one sort of trivial, the other sort of not trivial.

• Volkswagen makes an SUV. The first Volkswagens I ever saw (back in the late 1950s) were all, of course, the classic Beetle--and they were marketed for their efficiency and economy. I remember my dad sighing with admiration: They get twenty miles to the gallon!  (Time for some Prius Arrogance: We get 60 mpg in the summer, 50 in the winter.)

• The first car I ever owned (1966--I was not yet 22) was a 1965 VW, a special model they made back then called a Karmann-Ghia (kar-muhn gee-uh; the g is a hard g). It was a sort of a sports-car-looking thing--but it had the Beetle engine in it, so it didn't pass much on the road but pedestrians and slow bicyclists. Mine was dark blue, a little like the one in the pic you see.
• Anyway, in the drive-thru line the other night, we were right behind a big black fat VW SUV, and all I could do was sound like an Old Guy, so I said to Joyce, "Back when I was young ..." Such sentences, of course, are her signal to Tune Out.
• The second thing I learned was a little more complicated. At the payment window, the young woman working told us her name was Ariel. And I said, thinking of The Tempest (my favorite play by the Bard), "Ah, a Shakespearean name!"

• She looked at me as if I were daft, said, "No, it's Biblical."
• Now that--as they used to say--brought me up short. I didn't remember Ariel from the Bible, and when I got home, I hustled upstairs and consulted a volume of my grandfather's copy of The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. (Pic shows his copy.) And, of course, I discovered a fairly lengthy entry that mentions the name (or versions of it) in 2 Samuel, 1 Corinthians, Genesis, Numbers, and elsewhere. (So much for my attentiveness in church, Sunday School, church camp, and VBS.)
• I just this moment checked two scholarly editions of The Tempest to see what they say about Ariel (who, by the way, in both the Bible and Shakespeare, is male--though directors often cast a woman in the role because, women, as you know, don't have lots of parts in plays by the Bard, who wrote in a day when the law prohibited women from performing onstage).
• The Arden edition of the play has no footnote on Ariel--just the identification of him in the original text: an airy spirit.
• The Royal Shakespeare Company's edition--The Complete Works--does provide a note--and here's what it says: "Ariel, as well as having connotations of 'airness,' the name is Hebrew for 'lion of God'; also the name of a magical spirit in various occult texts; perhaps evocative of the archangel Uriel" (12).

So ... last week we sat behind a car-that-made-no-sense (to me) and received our Diet Cokes from the Lion of God. Only in an American drive-thru ...