A greasy diamond of sunlight splashed across the cafe floor kaleidoscoping into shards of broken light when the door swung open. A gaunt 15-year-old kid in jeans and blue pocket tee stood in the entry, hesitated, hurriedly rushed to the counter, then awkwardly dropped onto one of the seats at the end of the counter.
As the kid pulled a worn menu from its holder a weather-beaten farmer exclaimed to no one in particular, "It's hotter than Sam Hill out there today. Good day for baling hay." Farmer friends on both sides of him nodded. The waitress Sherry, who was patrolling the lunch crowd, smiled in agreement and leaned in toward the kid to take his order. He slightly leaned back and buried his face in the menu. Sherry was a hearty woman in her twenties, over-amped — just a bit too much of everything woman. Her physicality always unnerved him.
There was no need for a menu. The kid's order was always the same: hamburger and a Coke, 82¢. That allowed him a dime for an afternoon Coke out of the pop machine.
Sherry took his order back to the kitchen and the boy looked around the diner as he waited. He liked the place. It was small, narrow, low ceilings, with a u-shaped counter than seemed too large for the room. The air conditioning groaned out a tolerable temp. But the air was still and everyone in the place seemed to have a sheen of dampness on them.
When Sherry brought his meal there was always that moment of decision. Where did he look when he ate? Part of the time he watched the flies. Some madly buzzed against the window. Some practiced aerobatics to elude a swatting farm hand. As he ate, he'd often look up to see a host of flies fastened like barnacles from long straps of sticky fly paper suspended from the ceiling at strategic spots around the diner. He mostly listened to the push and pull of conversations. Idle talk, about corn and soybeans and hogs and cattle and long-hair-hippie-what-we'd-do-if-they-showed-up-here. This was a place with the world in a coffee cup. He liked it. He mostly thought of nothing. And to a hungry teen, the burger, side of free chips, and Coke tasted like heaven on a suffocating summer day.
As soon as he downed his meal there was no lingering. The kid worked across the street at Coggon Feed & Supply. He needed to get back to put the phone back on the hook. His dad, the boss, gave him permission to take the phone off the hook when he went for lunch. The kid didn't want to ruin that huge deal so he was always back in twenty minutes.
This was the summer of Woodstock. But in Coggon, this was a summer like any other for the kid. He fished. Camped. Some nights he sat out under the stars waiting for one to rocket across the sky. He fed hogs. Bailed hay. And dreamed of nothing, oblivious to anything beyond five miles from his home. It was bliss. He had no imagination for a life other than the feed store.
The mystery was his capacity for keeping the outside world at a distance. Like Houdini he managed to escape all thought of the chaos in Vietnam and America. The world was flat, easy to understand. And whenever he began to waken through exposure to ideas or experiences, he somehow managed to crawl back into his cocoon of safety.
That changed for good when the kid was shipped off to college in Missouri. He met people who shook his world. People who were passionate about ideas. People who ignited his imagination.
One of those fire starters was Jon, a guy who was with a band, Suncast. They'd come to campus to play a concert. The farm boy by this time had discovered music, and had been playing around town at coffeehouses. He was asked to warm up for the band. Afterwards Jon came up to this kid, now in his twenties, and asked him if he ever considered going to the studio to cut a demo.
Throughout the next thirty or so years, Jon has wandered in and out of that guys' life. Jon has been a success. He has lived big dreams. The kid didn't. Somehow the inertia of growing up dreamless stalled out his future. He never believed that he could realize his dreams. Never believed he had enough of whatever it is that makes doing those big things possible. And maybe that more than anything has been his bane.
Still, he is thankful for these friends, like Jon, who have given him so much to think about, thankful for the creativity they inspired in him, thankful for showing him the world was big and round and infused with mystery.
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