The hot air clung to me last night as if had stepped into my
shower stall with all my clothes on, making it difficult for me to move, and
even more difficult for me to sleep.
Ten cups of coffee at Kalico Kitchen didn’t help my
restlessness either, and between being wired and fighting off mosquitoes I
tossed one way, while scratching the other, trying to find a position where I
might drift off – but could not.
Jimmy was in a particularly good mood – as if the world and
its troubles didn’t exist. He laughed and split the illegally cool air of that
over conditioned restaurant with his heated humor, making us for get the wall
of hot air that hovered over the world outside.
He brought back the past Frank and I had ached for for
years, if not in reality then in spirit, as we recounted our stumbling paths
from a past when we had the whole future fingered out, to the confusing present
when past and future seemed so muddled, with markers of our lives standing out
like giant stones from the mist, times we were chased by dogs, women and angry
husbands (fresh from the grill with their stained aprons still on, brandishing
pointed folks and faces red with rage.)
Jimmy talked about the old dreams with nostalgia, unable to
quite release them when in reality our grip on them was wrenched loose by day
to day life, his words rekindling for a moment in that sacred hangout place of
our youth, replanted seeds of hope we all knew would whither the moment we once
more stepped out the door into the far too strong sunlight of the present. He
weaved the old tales, killing off Frank (that joke of Frank not surviving until
25) only to resurrect him again, and kill him again, and leave us in doubt as
to whether he was alive or dead or if we had all simply passed on to some other
plain of existence with this place, Kalico Kitchen, our heaven or hell, in
which we were to spend eternity.
In moments like this, I once more remembered why we had
taken up with Jimmy, and like apostles, had followed him through so many
weaving paths, tolerating the stinging thorns and the broken dreams, always
with the expectation that he would lead us out from the quagmire again. But I
also realized that he was not what we thought he was, and what he sold us was
an illusion, his dream manifest before us, a quivering image of what might be,
but which could not survive too close a scrutiny.
And yet, I also realized that without him or Frank or the
number of other that followed Jimmy over the last decade or so, I would have
lost myself in my own quagmire, and that in the end, it was better to be lost
with somebody like him, than to be lost alone, and as he and I sipped coffee,
and Frank sipped Coke, we were grateful for having taken the journey and would
be willing to do it all over again – if we ever got the chance.
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