That sneaky feeling

I get that strange feeling of being watched.  I drive through your neighborhood every day and I think you know it.  I think you know when.  Maybe not every day, but some days you see me.  You're out running errands, coming back from school, going to drop something off perhaps, or grab groceries for dinner and you look up and see my truck go by.  I don't know what you think about when this happens.  I don't know if you smile, frown; maybe look away.  I don't know if you laugh at how I put my hand on the steering wheel.  I wonder if you compare my old truck to the other, nicer cars surrounding me.  Maybe you think back on the friendship we had, the laughs we shared, the connections made.

I don't.  I just keep on driving.

The Drive To Work

On my way to work this morning, I remembered a shirt I saw in Breckenridge once.  I was enjoying the margarita happy hour at a downstairs taco bar on a Tuesday night when in walks a young, dreadlocked dirty hippie guy wearing a tshirt that said  POOR UGLY HAPPY.  Someone said it was an unofficial ski club or something, most likely a naturally occurring reaction to the common insurgence of RICH PRETTY SAD TEXANS.  I shouldn’t say that.  Colorado mountain folk generally cast a gloomy eye upon the visiting vacationers that come in and support the wintertime economy.  I’m not sure why this happens, I just picked up the vibe whie living and working in the small mountain communities.  Its almost as if they resent the Texans for their ability to vacation and have fun, yet forget it’s the very lifeblood of their existence; even in the summertime when the lifties and bartenders switch to their warm-weather income of landscaping and carpentering—it’s the Texas gold that turns the economic wheels. 

                But I digress.  It’s the paint on the walls of the taco bar I meant to converse with you about.  As I remember, the stairway down into the house of taco was narrow, wooden and sported the typical low ceiling of old basement stairs.  The walls were adorned with a refreshingly not-chain-restaurant variety of castoff memorabilia, the cast-aside bits of a 100-year old high-altitude resort town that after a requisite amount of time stir a certain feeling of nostalgia, of the good old days, when life was easy and cares were few.  Behind this first layer of wallcovering was the the second-a bright, sunshiny paint typical of what American restaurant owners use when trying to remind the dining public of a more southern exposure.  Yellow, orange, maybe green the walls, with a 48-inch-high wainscoting topped by a shy chair rail.  The stairs deposited the arriving guest at the corner of a cramped, weathered, beaten L-shaped bar, seating for 6 or 8, tops, backed by a busy barman in a dishwashing apron with a surprisingly trimmed beard (for a young hippie) and a small chalkboard touting the night’s drink specials.  In my opinion all drinks are special, and all gainfully employed, happy hippies are also a pleasure to be around, so I sat myself down and ordered up two margaritas and a plate of tacos.

                I’m not here to rehash some downstairs fish tacos and a mediocre margarita drunk that ended up with me waist-deep in a snowbank after jumping some lady’s backalley fence, however.  I wanted to tell you about Bub’s Café, a 7-2 breakfast joint at the Midwest’s ground zero for arts and design, the very epicenter of sky-pointed noses, the nucleus of the disposable income  jetset of the Grain Belt—Carmel, Indiana.  Bub’s Café does not have drink specials, nor do the employ hippies—they don’t even have a downstairs.  However, they DO have brightly colored walls.  I think this hidden memory, this faint, alcohol-fuzzed flashback from a long ago pub crawl on a Tuesday, has offered me a glimpse into how the brain functions.  Like a half-dead man crawling through the desert, parched with thirst yet still remembering the basic functions and machinations of life, my brain could have reacted to the pleasant memories associated with that little bar over a thousand miles away that I only patronized for a couple hours of a busy, busy life, and that could be why I love having breakfast at Bub’s.