The Good Luck Cafe.

(Dedicated to Tim Carman)


On my way back from The Hamsters I stopped at a roadside place called 'The Good Luck Cafe' for a piece of pie and a glass of milk.
But once I got inside I was enveloped in a Sysco fog that made me realize just how hungry I really was. Bunny and Phillip don't really feed you much at The Hamsters, although their bath towels have the highest thread count in the continental United States. So I glanced eagerly at the menu. Sometimes these little out-of-the-way places feature unique and tantalizing dishes, specialties that only the locals are ken to. 
The waitress brought me a glass of water and laid a paper straw next to it. One point in their favor. The sun set over the Borgo Pass as I asked her to recommend something good.
"The ham and chicken lungs are real good" she said.  
"That a house specialty?" I asked.
"Well, the cook made up a big batch before he started drinking again -- it shouldn't be too bad" she replied, reaching into her apron pocket to quiet an obstreperous ring tone. 
"What is weasel pie?" I asked her.
"Oh damn" said the waitress as she looked at her phone. "It's my boyfriend. I'll be right back, sweets."
I took a swig of water, surreptitiously sliding the paper straw into my coat pocket. I had a feeling that paper straws were going to become a collector's item one of these days.
Another waitress bustled up to my table. She only had one arm.
"Sorry about that, sir" she said to me. "Doris had to take a little break, so I'll take care of you. My name is Tracey."
Her name tag said 'Hilda,' but I hadn't the heart to contradict a one-armed girl.
"What is weasel pie?" I asked again.
"It's a chicken pot pie with sweet potatoes instead of red potatoes" she replied briskly.
That sounded safe, so I ordered it -- along with a side salad and a glass of iced tea.
"We're all out of iced tea" said the one-armed waitress cheerfully, "would you like a glass of hibiscus juice instead?"
"No thanks, water will be okay" I told her quietly. 

In about five minutes I had my weasel pie and salad, served by yet another waitress -- this one looked like Barbara Bush, and hummed softly to herself. 
"Thank you, ma'am" I said to her. She smiled and patted me on the shoulder.
Halfway through my weasel pie I found a Kennedy half dollar. I called Barbara Bush over to complain, but she pointed out that it was actually a Sacagawea dollar. So I wiped it off with a paper napkin and put it in my coat pocket with the paper straw. This was turning out to be a profitable little excursion.

At the counter the cashier turned out to be Doris with the boyfriend trouble. She looked grim, so I didn't bother to tell her the weasel pie was pretty good. Next to the cash register was a glossy black bowling ball on a small pedestal. 
"Rub it for good luck" said Doris brusquely. "It belonged to Billy Barty, the dwarf bowler. He was my granddad's brother."
The ball gleamed with some kind of polish, so I gave it a rub.
"Where's the genie?" I asked Doris with the boyfriend trouble, but she just looked at me with a face like a pan of cottage cheese.
 The glass counter next to the register, which is usually filled with stale gum and candy bars in places like this, was filled with cans of Barbasol shaving cream instead. Must be a lot of truckers come here to eat, I thought to myself as I gave Doris a twenty dollar bill. I looked around. Nope. There was an elderly couple sharing a bowl of chili, several middle-aged women in a booth sharing a copy of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and two cops eating hamburgers. But no truckers. I shrugged and took my change. Going back to my table, I left the Sacagawea dollar for my tip. 

Outside in the dark I noticed that the gravel under my feet was actually crushed coral. It released seaweed and rotted fish odors as I stepped on it. And next to my car was a blue plastic barrel full of cash. A hand-lettered sign on it said "TAKE ALL YOU WANT." But I took out my wallet and put a twenty in the barrel. Then I set the whole shebang on fire.
That's the kind of hairpin I am.

Made known unto them beforehand.

Telling them of things which must shortly come, that they might know and remember at the time of their coming that they had been made known unto them beforehand, to the intent that they might believe . . .
Helaman 16:5

Believe in God and all his ways

and worry not of future days.

Each particle, the very beams

of sun and moon, and all our dreams,

are known to him before their time;

our future with him is sublime.

Hold fast, though earth and heaven shake;

the morrow with be Christ's daybreak.

The Chandelier Maker.

My Bohemian mother and my Venetian father began my training in prisms and soda glass when I was too young to realize how dangerous refracted light could be -- poisonous like mercury or antimony. When you look into too many bent rays of light all at once, common sense is replaced by hubris.
But when that doleful knowledge finally came to me I still pursued my fatal course. You can judge for yourself from my narrative if I really had any choice in the matter.

Both my parents were artisans with Mussehl and Westphal, the chandelier company in Neenah, Wisconsin. You have heard of the company, even if you think you haven't. Besides chandeliers, they made glass ashtrays -- almost all the glass ashtrays that Americans used from 1899 to 1977. Heavy and square, with beveled edges, those ashtrays are indestructible and feature in many domestic violence cases. President Eisenhower gave them to every Ambassador in Washington for Christmas each year during his long and prosperous administration. I have one that I keep filled with sand in the kitchen. It has a tiny flaw in it -- an embedded bubble. I'm told it's worth more than a Rembrandt.

Neenah was a wonderful town to grow up in. My immigrant parents never really got the hang of English, but I grew up speaking it perfectly, had a deeply freckled face and a bicycle, and reveled in the endless green lawns and avuncular shade trees that lined the streets, spaced in military order. I drank milk and ate apples. My teeth outshone the whiteness of a ballistic missile. 
In his spare time my father made stained glass windows for the town's Lutheran churches. I helped him deliver them. We were a close-knit family, the three of us, and as soon as I graduated from high school I began working at Mussehl and Westphal, bending and polishing the ormolu pins used to hold the crystal prisms together. 

My mother wanted me to get out of the business. She created beveled facets on the finest of Bohemian crystal and Murano glass -- which caused her laughing blue eyes to turn pensive, and then muddy and sad. She begged my father to send me to West Virginia to work with my cousins in the Marble King factory. Marbles were safe, she said; they did not corrupt the light. My father's only reply was "He must hang his own chandelier first -- then he can go where he pleases."

When my mother went blind my father took her on a long visit to her hometown of Blatna, where she bathed her eyes in lake water until they turned green. When they returned I had become head foreman of the plant, and I made them retire with full pensions and benefits. 

When the royal family of Oudh ordered a five ton chandelier for their palace in Kashmir I laughed out loud with joy. I would supervise the building of it, the world's largest chandelier, and then I would retire from Mussehl and Westphal, a hero, to live in a cottage on the banks of the Fox River, and fish for sturgeon to feed to my mother. She longed for sturgeon the same way Rapunzel's mother longed for lamb's lettuce.

But then I met the daughter of the royal family of Oudh, Sakina. She had a beaky nose and imperious eyes. Her breath smelled of pandan. She came to the factory in Neenah to pay for the work with rubies and small bars of gold. She watched me and my workmen place each beveled crystal in a mathematical progression that was five hundred years old, until all five tons were dangling in front of her dirty face -- for she never washed, but kept her features swathed in kohl tattoos. She was proud and haughty, and I hated her. And then I loved her. I had the workers disassemble the five ton chandelier and pack it in crates stuffed with excelsior to ship to India. And when the crates were put on board the ship, I was there with Sakina. Sakina was in my arms, and, as soon as the captain married us, in my bed. When we arrived at her palace in Kashmir she was already pregnant with our first child. 

There were no competent craftsmen in all of Kashmir to help me put up the chandelier, so I had to train a dozen palace lackeys -- it took two years before I dared start on hanging the chandelier in the palace reception room. We had only just started with the base tier of crystal prisms when fighting broke out on the border. All of my skilled workers were sent to the front, and killed. I couldn't face training a new crew, so the chandelier, the five ton chandelier that was to be the wonder of the world and my ticket to fame, remained a half-constructed shambles. Then the monsoon came with terrible wind and malignant water, collapsing the roof of the reception room, burying my chandelier under plaster and lathe. Sakina sneered at my grief, calling me a tradesman who could never be a prince. So I left Kashmir and went back to Neenah, to banish the soft, insidious, tropical air from my lungs, and breathe in the crisp, clean, scent of pines again.

While I was gone my mother regained her eyesight; she and my  father then moved to West Virginia to design toothpaste marbles. I could have gone to join them, but who wants to fiddle with taws when you can build dazzling pyramids of crystal and light several stories high that cost millions of dollars? My name would be on each glittering pendant, as it already was in the ruins of the palace of Kashmir where my wife and children were patiently picking out bits of crystal to sell as diamonds in the local bazaar.
I'm still waiting for another prince from Muscat or some plutocrat from Nob Hill to commission something colossal. This time I will make it with Ciocca glass. This time Sakina will come back to me and admit she was wrong. This time . . . this time . . . 
There is no 'this time,' for I am going blind, like my mother. 

The Bus Ride.

When I turned 66 I became convinced, because of my reading of Zen Buddhist books, that every time I went to bed I woke up a different person the next morning.
I wasn't sure if I liked that or not.  I mean, how different was I each day? Could I wake up one day as Harold Stassen, or Nancy Pelosi?

So I didn't sleep well anymore, after that thought screwed itself into my brain. Usually I'd fall asleep while reading in my recliner at night and then wake up around midnight and have a snack and then write poems to my ex wife until the tears came, then throw myself on my bed, exhausted, and wake up at 8 or so, and get ready to go to the Senior Center on the bus they sent around at 9.

But one day the bus driver was a substitute who didn't know anybody, so I had to give her my name to write on her clipboard. First I said I was Marilyn Monroe, which got a laugh from the other geezers on the bus. Then I said my name was Elmer Fudge. The driver gave me a ferocious frown, unless she was suffering from the sudden onset of enteritis, so I thought I'd better give her the last real name I remembered myself as. But the name didn't sound right to me. I worried that I was being subsumed by a koan.

After I swam in the pool and ate a cheese danish with a glass of orange juice, I went outside to get on the bus back to my apartment. But there was a crowd around the substitute bus driver, with everyone shouting contradictory suggestions and giving confusing orders. 

I listened, growing so angry at the stupid remarks by people who didn't know what was going on and only wanted to say things to seem knowledgeable that I finally went back inside to sit on the vinyl couch by the gas fireplace and wait for night to fall or to become invisible or turn into a marble statue. But all that happened was that some gabby old lady sat down next to me to say the bus driver was making two trips, and I would be on the second trip. I grew to dislike that gabby old lady intensely in a matter of seconds, because she punctuated every other sentence with a meaningless laugh. 

The bus did not come back for forty minutes. The front desk said the substitute bus driver had gotten lost. While I waited I collected several brown rocks with purple stripes or bands in them to put in my coat pocket. By the time the bus got back the heavy rocks had torn holes in my coat pockets and rolled around on the sidewalk, making an ominous chalky noise.

Everyone spoke Spanish on the bus but me.
The driver went in the opposite direction of where I lived.
A small red light kept flashing silently above my head.
And suddenly I knew that my name must really be Tod Williams, and that I had taught scuba diving out in Hawaii on Wailuku Beach for years before retiring because of sand in my craw.

Everyone was dropped off before me. I was the last person on the bus, and the substitute bus driver kept scowling at me. She never forgave me for that Elmer Fudge crack, I guess. I could see her frowning in her rear view mirror. I had to use the bathroom pretty bad when we got to my place, but as we pulled up I realized this was not where I lived. I told the substitute bus driver, she asked me well then just where did I think I lived -- this was where she had picked me up that day. So I got off, thanking her for her patience and kind understanding. She whistled the Whiffenpoof  song back at me in a very insulting manner.

Once inside the apartment building I pulled out my key, but didn't recognize it. Was I having a stroke? Had I died and gone to some existential Camus world? I hate asking myself questions, no matter how many times I've been reincarnated -- so I put the key in the first locked door I came to, and it opened right up.

Inside I found pleasant tropical plants scattered tastefully around some heavy leather furniture that looked so inviting I had to sit down. Next to my chair was a bowl of chocolate covered raisins. As I ate them I felt lighter and younger. A young woman in a black cocktail dress, with a yellow poke bonnet on her head, came into the room and played the harp for me.

"Who are you?" I asked her when she had finished playing When You Were Sweet Sixteen.

"Just as you please" she answered me, then softly walked into another room where I could smell grapefruit. I followed and found myself in a sun room where miniature lemon and orange trees flourished in glossy brown clay pots. The wicker furniture was painted white. When I sat down I heard a brainfever bird. When the men with the white dinner napkins finally came, I was ready to go with them. You can't fight your fate.   

I will make thy food become sweet

I will make thy food become sweet, that ye cook it not . . .
1 Nephi 17:12

Before I touch my daily meat

I pray the Lord to make it sweet

so I may travel on my way

with cheerful countenance today.

So many lack a decent meal,

are forced to beg or even steal;

fast offerings I will increase

in lieu of any elbow grease,

or else a pan of muffins I

will place out for the passersby.

I 

Photo Essay: Farewells are always blurry.

When did I

develop a

Bluto head?

Is this 

any way to

treat a banana?

I need signs that say:

WARNING!

Boredom ahead.

Tangled

and dead

is still dead.

My life

is not

Full Service.

Never trust

people who say

'Just turn the knob.'

Farewells 

are always

blurry.

And your old men shall dream dreams

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams 
Acts 2:17

I have dreamt along the hours

of angel shadows and their powers.

I close my eyes and do conceive

a Throne where I may seek reprieve;

the Spirit cascades through my soul,

and so the Lord has made me whole.

You daughters and young men take heed:

your visions will my dreams exceed!

Autobahn grün streichen

Ein neues Gesetz, das der deutsche Gesetzgeber Ende letzten Jahres verabschiedet hat, tritt ab März dieses Jahres in Kraft und sieht vor, dass lange Strecken der legendären Autobahn des Landes dunkelgrün gestrichen werden. Von den knapp über achttausend Kilometern Straße, die derzeit als "Autobahn" gekennzeichnet ist, werden fast fünfzig Prozent in der neuen Farbe gestrichen, die die Autobahntechniker als "Waldgrün" gekennzeichnet haben.
Es gibt verschiedene Gründe für die Änderung, so die in den letzten Wochen an die Medien gerichteten Regierungsmitteilungen.
In erster Linie geht es um die Sicherheit. Da die NATO-Staaten mehr davon überzeugt sind, dass die Vereinigten Staaten nicht mehr an ihrer Verteidigung interessiert sind, ist es von großer Bedeutung geworden, die Infrastruktur jedes Landes vor möglichen Raketenangriffen Russlands zu schützen. Militärexperten sagen, dass die Beschattung des Autobahngrüns es effektiv vor Flugzeug- und Raketenangriffen verdeckt.
Eine kürzlich von der Autobahnbehörde in Auftrag gegebene Studie hat ergeben, dass Autofahrer bei ständiger Einwirkung von grünem Straßenbelag seltener Straßenrummel oder Opfer von Straßenrummel werden.
Und schließlich wollten die in Deutschland äußerst mächtigen Grünen, dass die Straßen einen natürlicheren Blick auf das Land werfen.
Kritiker sagen, die Änderung der Farbe würde ein Vermögen kosten und nur minimale, wenn überhaupt, positive Ergebnisse bringen. Es wird geschätzt, dass die gesamte Lackierung rund 20 Millionen Euro kosten wird.

Photo Essay: Answers to questions never asked.

STOLEN.

Years ago from me.

No reward.

The laundry of life

never stays

folded.

I confess:

Sometimes, I can't

help liking myself.

If you start

early enough

it's still yesterday.

One day

I sat down

and never got up.

I eat,

Therefore 

I am.

Living on the street.

A neighborhood

of one.