Three Tales of Misplaced Royalty, Existential Pancakes, and the Queen of the Sunrise Café
O P I N I O N
By Keith Howard
Tale #3: The Queen of the Sunrise Café
Sheila, Che’s Daughter, and the Coffee Pot Scepter
If Jonathan’s delusion was wistful and Brad’s was existential, Sheila’s was downright mythic.
Sheila wasn’t just a waitress at the Sunrise Café. She was royalty—or so she claimed. Not your average “descended from someone important” royalty, mind you. Sheila believed her biological parents were Che Guevara and a blue-blooded queen of the Iroquois. She’d tell this story with the solemnity of a bedtime prayer, her voice dropping to a reverent hush.
“They were stolen from me,” she’d say, narrowing her eyes like she was daring the universe to deny her.
The thing is, Sheila didn’t look the part of a revolutionary princess. With her teased blonde hair and eyeliner thick enough to survive a hurricane, she looked more like the reigning queen of diner culture. Her apron, perpetually dusted with flour, clung to her sturdy frame, and her gait was less royal glide and more determined waddle. But none of that mattered to Sheila. The poof in her hair was her crown, the coffee pot her scepter, and the ketchup-stained counter her throne. Even her varicose veins, which she called her “marks of endurance,” were, in her words, “blue blood, baby.”
One slow afternoon, I couldn’t help myself. “Sheila,” I asked, “you do know Che Guevara wasn’t royalty, right? He was a middle-class Argentine. A doctor. Died years before you were born?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “Royalty isn’t about titles. It’s in your blood,” she said, tapping her arm like she was revealing a secret lineage. “Che was basically royalty. And my mother? The last Queen of the Iroquois.”
I tried again. “But the Iroquois didn’t have queens. They were a democracy.”
Sheila lit up, triumphant. “Exactly. She was the last queen. She freed them. Then they made her president. Leadership, kid, it’s in my genes.”
For Sheila, the truth wasn’t the point. Her imagined lineage wasn’t just a story—it was armor against the linoleum floors and sticky ketchup bottles of the Sunrise Café. “I’m hidden here,” she’d say, topping off a coffee cup with a flourish. “In plain sight. Until the right moment.”
And as she shuffled off, coffee pot in hand, I couldn’t argue. Sheila may not have had a palace or a crown, but she ruled that little diner like the queen she believed she was.
As I said, the fantasy seems almost universal. I’ve started asking new people in my life about their wrong-crib, wrong-parents, wrong-life stories. The details vary—sometimes wildly—but they all circle the same idea: My life is less than it should be. I was destined for greatness, wealth, sophistication—or maybe just a pony. And then Fate, God, a careless nurse, or a burglary ring snatched it all away.
Jonathan’s aristocracy, Brad’s Parisian exile, Sheila’s revolutionary bloodline—these were just magnified versions of a universal itch. I was meant for more. Someone stole it from me.
The details vary—lake houses, French cafés, revolutionary royalty—but the core is the same: a hunger for a life bigger than mashed potatoes and Denny’s booths.
That’s why I’m here, under the masthead Pompous Jackassery: to remind you that even if you never get your Gauloises or your palace, you still get the story. And sometimes the story is beautiful. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s even ugly.
Still, it’s the stories we tell that make us who we are—and who we might become. Resentment is an easy crop to grow—just plant a seed and wait for the bitterness to bloom. It may be the human condition to look around, identify what’s missing and stew about it.
Gratitude, on the other hand, takes effort. It seems unnatural to look at what you have and marvel that you’ve got anything at all. Jonathan and Sheila were busy cultivating their harvest, cursing the universe for what it didn’t bring them.
I can’t curse that universe. I’ve been given far more than I deserve—mountains more. As Hamlet sort of said: give every man what he deserves, and we’d all be whipped at sunrise. For me, a single identifiable decision, a flip of the coin, set everything in motion.
You’ll see how that motion played out, decision by decision, but before we get there, I need to go back to that coin flip.
. . .
Next week: more pompous jackassery. More mortal concerns. Maybe a broom sweeping the night sky. Maybe an existential chicken nugget. Stick around.
Publisher’s Note: This is a new series of columns by Keith Howard – you know him from his Tiny White Box series, and as former Executive Director of The Liberty House and Hope for NH Recovery. You can read the second tale in this trilogy here. His new memoir, Unclaimed, But Loud: The Memoir of a Shy and Retiring Boy Who Was Neither, is available for purchase on Amazon.