I noticed recently that the places my mind flees to in order to escape momentary fits of existential panic aren’t what they used to be.
It used to be all americanna, from a bygone age. David Lynch style diners with a dreamy sensual aesthetic. Freshly painted white picket fences and victorian country homes. Brutalist concrete garages of old men and their coffee cans of metal. Military flat top haircuts to match the green green grass on a 4th of July barbeque. Johnny Cash. Bob Dylan. Eggs and bacon in the cast iron with coffee and a cigarette. The sunday comics in the morning, A Prairie Home Companion and a doobie down some back roads in the afternoon.
A lot of that came from an active decade of breakfasts and lunches with my gramps at various grey haired diners similarly on the edge of permanent retirement. The remnants were important. They were an important tether to that aesthetic and attitude as a reality for my mind to accept and dwell in, even recreationally. And now that both the people- Gramps, Denny, Big Al, Archie. And the places- Jespersons, The Bistro, Flapjack Shack, Allen’s Northside, Out To Lunch- are all gone, it’s hard to live in the spirit they all held. Regardless of how much I treasured it. Regardless of how hard I tried to hang on to it.
Now my mind retreats to a safe place filled with inner warmth and snow falling on the mountains outside the window. Somewhere in the future, rather than the past.
Though the past still begs its due, particularly when I’m driving in the winter, and I cannot escape visions of dark evenings in old cars and dimly lit faces in cigarette smoke. The thinnest layer of mirth and joy underneath the oppressive weather; lights; city streets.
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