Diners I have Known #5

I’ve lived in four states in my life, & they’re all distinct in terms of geography & region, but also in terms of memory & personal narrative: Vermont was the place of my childhood, & then, in a different part of the state, the site of my wastrel youth & college years; Virginia—all poetry, all the time, in all the best & worst senses of the word; San Francisco—the most beautiful city I’ve ever seen, more poetry, some dear friends, & ultimately a decision to opt for life & health—& the place I plucked my first notes on the guitar; Indian Valley: home now, a place of love & creativity, of gardens & guitars & banjos & blogs….

But now my mind wanders back to Charlottesville, a University town in the heart of Virginia, a lovely place, really, with the magnolia blossoms & the redbuds & the curving brick walls on the campus. My memories of this town are complex & difficult to summarize: all-night poem writing, the oppressive summer heat, the profusion of insects, cigarette smoke all around me—as they said of W.H. Auden, “Everything he touched turned to cigarettes”—true of me at the time; & although my days of booze & better living thru chemicals were already behind me when I landed in Charlottesville, late nights in various nightspots, & those nights full of poetry & amours & the amours very much the stuff of poems; a place for Apollinaire & Sir Thomas Wyatt & John Berryman & Le Roman de la Rose….

& in the midst of this place, unassuming but somehow central to me memory of it was an eatery called the College Inn. The College Inn was (& in fact still is, as I understand, tho they seem to have a problem with their website) located on University Avenue in the area known as “the Corner.” This is right across from the campus on a bit of a slope that eventually leads to downtown proper.

Different people will remember different things about the College Inn of course; for instance, in an email exchange with Audrey Bilger, she mentioned the place mats. I recall the solid clear glass ashtrays & the pattern of tables; & I recall the delicious gyros & souvlaki, which I almost always ordered—tho I believe they could whip up a mean grilled cheese & fries with a salad as well. My love for those Greek fast foods was born at the College Inn & continues to this day. & tho I’ve most happily given up my addiction to Coca Cola a long time past (nothing but coffee, tea, water & juice for this boy now), I remember the big fluted Coke glasses.

So the College Inn wasn’t fine dining—yet everyone came there—undergraduates, townies, grad students such as myself, professors. I specifically remember one day poets Charles Wright & Greg Orr were sitting at a table by the wall, laughing & generally having a good time—I seem to remember that Orr was eating pizza (did they sell by the slice?—I can’t recall).

I often ended up there with very good poebiz pal Jonah Winter, & we’d discuss the absurdities of the universe & the exigencies of various loves & the hilariousness of poetry. Mr Winter saw poetry as closely akin to stand-up comedy, & this has stood him in good stead as he has had some success in the poebiz field—kudos to him. Jonah was always a great fellow to have at a reading because you could rely on him for some belly laughs that would loosen everyone else up.

But at one time or another I was there with practically everyone who was important to me at the time, & I have some personal individual stories connected to this. Poems were written in composition books or on napkins, as were phone numbers. The waitresses knew what we’d order & unless we were there at a busy hour, could tolerate the endless cups of coffee & cigarettes consumed during our symposia.

When I went back on a sort of pilgrimage to Charlottesville in 1996—literally just a few weeks before I stopped writing poetry almost “for good” (a coincidence?)—I didn’t visit the College Inn. The few days I spent there I was on edge, fighting a rush of various memories that I’d only allowed to surface in some transmogrified way in poems. I actually believe my fear of flying, which at this point is admittedly rather morbid, racheted up a notch during that trip, & I just couldn’t feel secure in my own skin. Those are feelings I often had at that point in life, but which I couldn’t really identify….

Ah well, to quote Bob Dylan, “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.” Charlottesville isn’t so much a mixture of fever dream & cartoon & Petrarchan canzone, but a place where I was young beyond my years (to contradict the Dylan quote). Is “youth wasted on the young?” I’ve said that, specifically in terms of Charlottesville—but no, it’s only youth: high spirits & boundless enegry—truly boundless, & thus going in all directions, both for better & worser….

Now I really feel the demons that haunted my poetry have packed their grips & have caught the train to parts unknown; & tho I know they could get a return ticket & catch the midnight special back to town, I’m beginning to see that one might find some measure of peace along with poetic creation—a foreign concept to me for much of my life….

I wonder if the blossoms are already perfuming the Charlottesville air in the evenings….

For your viewing pleasure: a brief tour of Charlottesville from snapshots taken in the 1980s. The house you see is the one where I lived for much of the time & wrote many a poem; there are also interior shots—including one of Eberle’s piano, which she gave to me for safekeeping after she moved to Idaho, & which I played on those warm spring nights. The final shot is yours truly at a poetry reading at Williams Corner Bookstore—now no longer extant, but a truly wonderful place in its day. The music is a solo guitar piece I came up with for our Moominpappa at Sea soundtrack, played fingerstyle on my old Washburn. Hope you enjoy.

Diners I Have Known #4

Up to now I’ve written about I’ve written about diners from a "mythic" past—partly remembered “fact” & partly remembered “fiction.” This month’s diner comes from the recent past, however—& probably also belongs to the future, unlike the Miss Bellows Falls or the Blue Moon, or certainly the defunct Ed’s Café. Which isn’t to say that its presence in the current flow of my life prevents it from commingling the real & the imaginary, even tho neither Eberle nor I had ever visited it until early in this quickly waning calendar year.

I’ve written previously about Winnemucca, an oddly stark oasis in Nevada’s high desert, about how I’ve passed thru Winnemucca at various existential crossroads. Eberle & I have passed thru Winnemucca together a number of times, too, on the way to visit dear friends in both the Bay Area & in SoCal, & all roads lead to Winnemucca—actually, the one road, US Highway 95, leads to Winnemucca, where it intersects with I-80, which then either leads back to the two-lane lonesomeness of US 95 south thru the salt flats north of Fallon, or on to the Sierras & the multi-lane mayhem of Sacramento & the Bay Area.

It seems that no matter when we leave Idaho, we need to eat when we reach Winnemucca: this can be anytime between early afternoon or my own “personal best” of about 9:15 a.m. But Winnemucca isn’t a Mecca for gourmands—it could actually seem to be a dilemma to chow down here before rolling across the stretches of tumbleweed & lethal hot springs & truck stop casinos to the west…. Fade to flashback….

It was a Sunday evening, early March this year. I was sitting in the music room, playing the guitar, not intently but in a slightly distracted fashion. There was a lot of free-floating anxiety—a long, & ultimately personal story, but a member of Eberle’s family was involved in a rather horrifying divorce, & there was serious speculation that Eberle might be subpoenaed as a witness for the “other” side—something she didn’t want to happen; her family urged her to sequester herself—the underlying motivations for their guidance were muddled, at least. She came into the music room & we talked—about 17 hours later we were in a fully loaded Subaru headed south on US 95, having dodged the subpoena we were sure would inevitably arrive in a Sheriff’s car just as we were loading the guitar or the last backpack….

With a mid afternoon start, we only made it to Jordan Valley, OR that day—having progressed from the mud & snow & cold of Indian Valley to the bare, frozen ground & snow patches & savage wind of the high Oregon desert at winter’s last hurrah; we stayed in a second floor room in the incongruously monikered Sahara Motel in a room with stunningly retro fixtures & a door held closed against the wind by a guitar case…a story in itself.

Next morning we were off southward, & we pulled into Winnemucca in the late morning, exhilarated by taking it on the lam to the Bay Area & discombobulated by the anxiety & strangeness of becoming sudden fugitives—& hungry & wondering if there was anywhere worth eating in this oasis of casinos & franchise motels. I caught sight of The Griddle’s sign, & thought it had a beckoning retro look….

The joint was bustling with a mixture of the late breakfast & early lunch crowds—we opted for the latter; Eberle ordering a salad, while I ordered chili. The place was trim; the light thru the windows was warm—Winnemucca’s 50 degrees felt balmy after Indian Valley & Jordan Valley. To our delight, Eberle’s salad actually contained real greens, & Romaine lettuce—this wasn’t the typical Iceberg salad of western diners; the chili was tasty & satisfying.

On our way back north & east after a week in Negri’s Motel in Occidental, CA—after wonderful lunches & breakfasts at Howard's & an amazing dinner at the Willow Room Market & Café in Graton & Glen Park jam sessions with burrito appetizers—we thought a lot about a mid afternoon lunch at The Griddle…only to pull into Winnemucca around 2:30 & find the place closed. We wound up at a mediocre Mexican joint & swore we’d never make that mistake again—The Griddle closes at 2:00 p.m.

Later that month we were on the road south once again, this time without the sheriff on our tail (so to speak), but rather to perform for a screening of Nell Shipman’s The Grub-Stake at Claremont-McKenna College in sunny SoCal in its late March pollen splendor—the performance courtesy of Claremont-McKenna’s droll film maven Jim Morrison & our all-time fave English Lit/Gender Studies prof & all-around good buddy Audrey Bilger. We stopped at The Griddle heading south & north this time…. don’t remember the menus that time around, tho one was a late breakfast that might have involved eggs on Eberle’s side & French Toast on mine—the place still trim, the booths still comfortable, the light still bright & blue & yellow thru the windows….

Early last month I made two stops at The Griddle on my way to & from Occidental to catch up with good pal Dani Leone & help her re-furnish her cottage in the Redwoods & reclaim our nightclubbing past in Baghdad by the Bay & generally talk each other thru our individual pasts & futures over a number of delightful meals. But on a sunny Friday morning I was at The Griddle before 9:30 a.m. having pulled out of Indian Valley about 4:00; the breakfast quesadilla was nothing to pen a postcard about, but it got me thru to the western Sierra foothills happily enough, & the giant orange squeezing machine behind the counter was cranking out glasses of fresh juice….

On the way home it was cloudy—cloudy in Winnemucca! The autumn was winding down; I made it to The Griddle with thirty minutes to spare & for a time suspected I was their last customer of the day, until the waitresses were chagrined to see three parties walk in around 1:50. I was happily sustained by the chicken pot pie you see in the pic below—a real chicken pot pie, with a real crust, not the pale imitations you find in the supermarket freezer section—all the comfort vegetables & the creamy gravy…. It was still six hours to home, but it’s the sort of food that will take you lots of miles down the road.

Would I drive to Winnemucca with the sole intent of eating at The Griddle? No. But I’d be glad to see that sign appear again, because it’s a welcome stop on the way to places I love, places that are vivid in my imagination; it’s a comforting stop I’ve made during trips that accumulate mythic details as I move thru them again in memory….

Bay Area Eats

There are lots of ways to talk about travel: topography, ethnography, climate, flora & fauna. This is the John Mandeville approach, tho it appears he made most things up—however, that didn’t seem to present too many problems to the 14th century reading audience. Then, too, you can talk about the transformative aspects of being on the road & going to other places, both familiar & unfamiliar—the Kerouac approach to road trip tales. In my own case, I could talk lyrically or sentimentally or humorously about the Sunday night show at Café Du Nord in Baghdad by the Bay, which featured all sorts of musician folks from the wonderful 90s—like Joel Murach ex of Paddlefoot & Ray Halliday aka Earl Butter of the Buckets & gee-tar wizard Bernie Jungle of Warm Wires & Todd Costanza songwriter supreme of Granfaloon Bus & Virgil Shaw singer & guitarist ex of Dieslhead & other folks I’d mention except I don’t know or recall their names, but who included Jeff & Rachel Stevenson the grilled cheese makers from the Hemlock Tavern’s “Smallest Show in Town,” & also a very nice bass player & singer respectively.

& they’re also the folks who hire my best pal Dani Leone as a nanny, which is kind of important to the story, because one enormous aspect of travel when you live in Indian Valley is food (as I’ve said before & will again). Because if I’m writing about food on my recent trip to the Bay Area, I’ve gotta start at the beginning, which was homemade jambalaya chez Dani in her cottage amongst the redwoods; & Bernie Jungle was there, too, along with his dying Toyota van—which was later towed all the way back to Oakland courtesy of AAA plus. But Dani’s jambalaya was superb—she’d perfected the techniques just the day before at her nanny gig—fluffy rice, savory sausage & chicken, & spices to wake up the old taste buds even after a 13-hour drive.

But if you’re traveling to the Bay Area, & specifically deepest, darkest Sonoma County, you may not get invited to eat chez Dani—which is your loss, but we’ve gotta be realistic here. However, if you’re anywhere within shouting distance of Occidental, CA—a charming ex-railroad town amongst the redwoods & along the aptly named Bohemian Highway (once settled by Italian immigrants, now settled by hippies), & if it’s any time near either breakfast or lunch, you have to go to Howard’s.

Howard’s is one of the superior breakfast spots I’ve encountered in a lifetime spent seeking out same. Large savory omelets—fresh squeezed OJ—biscuits—home fries—waffles—& lots of other stuff, tho why you’d need to venture further the omelets is beyond me. The beauty pictured below is a Cajun Omelet, with spicy sausage & jalapenos & lots of delectable things; & check out those biscuits & home fries off to the side! Howard’s was named for “Dutch Bill” Howard, a 19th century settler who finagled a lifetime free pass on the North Pacific Coast Railroad by ceding a right-of-way. Actually, “Dutch Bill” Howard wasn’t Dutch, but German, & his name wasn’t Howard—he was a sailor who’d jumped ship in San Francisco back in the gold rush days & who then sailed a stolen boat up the coast till he came to the site of Occidental—where he stayed put.
So anyhoo, Dani was re-furnishing her cottage during my visit, & I had the pleasure of accompanying her on a major thrift store outing in search of rocking chairs (we did find them—including a lovely antique folding rocker!) This is hungry work, so we had no choice but to adjourn to Pho Vietnam in Santa Rosa.

When you live in Indian Valley, ID, it’s quite possible to spend hours daydreaming about the kind of Vietnamese food you can find in the Bay Area. & tho Pho Vietnam is improbably located in a strip mall (Stony Point Plaza), the food is definitely not strip mall quality (actually, strip mall restaurants get a bad rap—two of our favorite Boise restaurants are Madhuban Indian Cuisine & the Mongolian BBQ, both in Northgate Plaza). That’s Dani in the pic up top attending to some extremely savory eye round steak Pho; yours truly got the delicious BBQ pork dish you see pictured below.
We’ll skip over the tasty spaghetti & meatball Sunday dinner chez Earl Butter—with combo pork & beef meatballs prepared by Dani & a killer diller tomato sauce whipped up by Mr Butter himself—who knew what Earl could do when you got him away from his Telecaster? But Dani & I were starving when we rolled out of Café Du Nord on Sunday evening, & we rolled into New Chinatown—aka Inner Richmond—looking for any kind of car food we could nosh during the long drive back to redwood country. Fortunately for us, there was no shortage of options even at that late evening hour, & we pushed past a trio of slightly tipsy & very mildly rowdy guitar-toting youngsters on the sidewalk into Lee Hou Restaurant on 332 Clement Street.
Lee Hou has a sort of dour atmosphere, despite the lime green walls & the paintings of dolphins & a large screen TV showing a Chinese language adventure show. The waiter looked vaguely gangsterish (in an old school way) with his rumpled gray suit & kinda shifty gaze. But the food (chicken wings & lamb stick) really hit the spot, especially the former, served on a bed of cabbage & jalapenos & breaded & perfectly spiced & cooked to order. The lamb stick (which is just what it sounds like—lamb on a long skewer) took a bit of acclimation, especially after the wings, but once you switched gustatory gears they were also delightful.

Occidental is in the redwoods, but just a short winding drive up a steep hillside brings you to Bodega Bay—& that necessitates some form of seafood. On Monday, under gray skies filled with pelicans, Dani & I made our way to Spud Point Crab Co. They were sold out of crab cakes, but fortunately it wasn’t that long ago I’d gotten a fix at Cannon Beach’s Cranky Sue’s; & anyway, they really talk up their clam chowder (which Dani’s taking for a test drive in the pic below), & there’s good reason for them to do so—it’s creamy & tasty. If one were to quibble, one might say that the Styrofoam cup is a bit small for $6.95, but hey—this is really good clam chowder, & part of the quibble’s related to that fact.

Anyhoot, when I hit the road in the gray morning twilight Tuesday morning, I had a whole bunch of Bay Area eats to dream about until my next road trip down to those parts.

Diners I Have Known #3

Somewhere in the agricultural wilds of Davis, CA there used to stand an odd little diner known as Mr Ed’s. I know it was in operation as recently as 1988—I guess that’s not so recently, is it? When I hear the date 1988 it seems like it wasn’t so long ago; when I think about the events of that year, they seem to have taken place “in a galaxy far away….”

& I don’t recall specifically when I discovered Mr Ed’s was no more, but that was also a looong time past. But I do recall you could see it from I-80, zooming west toward Baghdad by the Bay or, as I did the first time, zooming east toward the pastures of Davis. That was a different lifetime—a story that’s too distant & too complicated to tell here: a flight out of Dulles I almost missed; some confusion at SF International involving credit cards & car rentals, a cream-white Ford Taurus, a warm California evening, a drive just long enough to get interesting from San Fran to Davis….

In an earlier post I talked about a trip when I fell passionately in love with the West—this was that trip. Mr Ed’s, a diner standing in a palm grove, played some small role in that. What else do I recall? Outside the diner, the scent of unfamiliar flowers…. it was March, & coming from Virginia it didn’t seem unusual to encounter blossoms…. it did seem unusual to encounter palm trees, tho of course the NorCal palm trees are all introduced, not native. There was the big sign, & a phone booth…. a small parking lot with a view of the interstate…. inside there were two rows of booths in a rectangular building, with the grill, the soda machine, etc. facing the doorway…. was the upholstery some sort of red Naugahyde, or have I made this up 20 years later? Were my companion & I—a gal friend from a different era—really the only folks in the joint? It was dark outside, & may have been late…. it’s possible.

Improbably enough, I do recall the evening’s fare—for both of us, because we both had the same thing: grilled cheese & fries & Cokes. How did I drink so much Coca-Cola in those days? It sets my teeth on edge now….

When you’re in the midst of life, at any given moment—but always looking back & looking ahead—every event seems inevitable; all the actions you’ve taken to that moment have led you there. If you’re inspired by the moment, you take that inevitability as providential, as a sign of some larger plan, the meaning of which is being revealed to you at that very instant: you can see the plan like a book that falls open to a certain page, & all you want to do is read on because this is the story you’ve been living all along without knowing it. Looking back at any event like this from the perspective of 20 years, one realizes it wasn’t inevitable at all—it was one more occurrence based on a series of both choices & circumstances: there was really no inevitability at all to my sitting in Mr Ed’s drinking a Coca-Cola from one of those large fluted Coke glasses. I could just as easily have been sitting with someone else in a night spot in Charlottesville, or in an apartment in Burlington, VT—especially given my predilection for chemical excess as a young fellow (a past that was only eight years behind me at that point), I could have been non-existent—in a word, dead. Also, it’s true that this trip to California, with its heady moments at Mr Ed’s (can a dinner of grilled cheese & fries be “heady”?—well, of course) was a crucial moment in the future I’ve actually lived, tho not in the way I believed it would be at the time.

Waking up early to roosters crowing; a jaunt to gold country; a jaunt to Bodega Bay, & then down 101 to Baghdad by the Bay itself—an evening in Caffé Trieste looking out at the North Beach traffic—lattés in bowl-sized white cups—the tawdry wild west splash of lights on Broadway, the inviting yellow glow from inside City Lights bookstore, a Chinatown neon sign reading “Buddha Cocktail”… all these sights & the feel of a place insinuating themselves into my soul for reasons other than those I believed…..

I only went to Mr Ed’s one other time, just a couple of months later, at the end of an east-west road trip. That’s when the rather under-exposed pic above was taken. My old Charlottesville poebiz pal Jonah Winter & I had set off toward the sunset, each on mapcap romantic adventures that ultimately took us to far different locations—both at the time, & (in retrospect) since. I started out from Charlottesville on an early evening, leaving from another diner that lives mythically in my memory, the College Inn—made it to a Motel 6 in Knoxville—next day made it to Dallas, & collected Mr Winter who was there—on to some good-forsaken motel in the mountains of New Mexico—on to some chain motel in Barstow (after a delightful supper involving coconut cream pie at a diner in Needles)—& leaving Barstow & somehow taking a wrong turn we were headed for LA—& for complicated reasons, I tried to talk Jonah into going there so I could visit someone else—but couldn’t talk him into it, & so went on to Davis, & Mr Ed’s, where Jonah & I had supper & we got a vegetable soup to go for the gal friend who for complicated reasons chose not to join us. I’m sure I had a grilled cheese, fries & a Coke; can’t recall what Jonah ordered. But he was traveling on to other parts, & I stopped over for a complicated stay in Davis, that culminated in a Greyhound bus ride back to Charlottesville….

The bus ride ensured that I was in love with the West.

As for the rest, it’s mostly a closed chapter in the story—a cul-de-sac of sorts, but also a thru route into what happened later; a bit more than a year later, in an overloaded 78 maroon Bonneville, with another gal friend & a dog, & all the possessions we could cram in, moving to San Francisco. Was that when I found out Mr Ed’s was out of business, or was it later?

I could say more—how Mr Ed’s particularly charmed me because as a young lad I was obsessed with the talking horse show, Mr Ed. I could talk about the gray light in the early morning in an upstairs “in-law” apartment in Davis, or hearing the Abecedarians song “Spaghetti Western” on the radio, or the brisk golden wind swirling off the breakers at Bodega Bay. But as so often happens, I thought one thing was happening when another was; & in between those two, Mr Ed’s disappeared.

Diners I Have Known #2

In the mythic recesses of my earlier life is the time from the summer of 1984 to the summer of 1989 when I lived in Charlottesville, VA. It was a heady time in a heady place—trees seemed to be in bloom constantly, & not just the ubiquitous & lemony magnolias. & of course as befits a place built on red clay, it seemed as though everything third building was made of brick—not to mention the walkways.

Ah well, the world was a trifle younger then, & we were all centuries younger—because for the most part, my memories of Charlottesville revolve around the graduate English Department at the University of Virginia, & especially the MFA writing program that was part of said department, & most especially the poetry program within said writing program, because that’s where I was deeply involved in poebiz for two of those five years (& really, all of the five, even after I had “an advanced degree” in 86).

But what, you say, does this have to do with diners? On Main St in Charlottesville was—& is, as I’ve discovered—the Blue Moon Diner. Now, just in case anyone came here by virtue of our good friends at Google (the hosts of this particular potluck), this is not a review of the restaurant as it currently exists; I last ate at the Blue Moon Diner sometime in 89; was back in Charlottesville for a few days in 1996, but didn’t eat there, & for that matter 96 is 12 years ago—yikes! I understand the place closed for a bit & re-opened. Looking around online, it does seem people still like it, tho….

But returning to the mid to late 1980’s for a few more paragraphs, it was the place for poets to breakfast on weekends—or whenever we could find time in our “busy” (heh, heh, heh) schedules. When you’re on a fellowship at an MFA program (at least this was my experience) you’ve got lots of time to go out & concoct grist for the mill of future poems & stories. Having thought about this little article for a bit, I do recall that we also breakfasted from time to time at the Howard Johnson’s—whatever happened to Howard Johnson’s? I’ll have to write about that sometime—& actually at least a couple of my more memorable Charlottesville breakfasts took place in the blue & orange eatery; & of course, there was also the very delicious Spudnuts in my own Belmont neighborhood (best doughnuts ever! & glad to see it’s still around) but still, when I think of breakfasts in Charlottesville, I think of the Blue Moon Diner. I know two regular readers of this blog, Eberle & Audrey probably have their own memories of the Blue Moon, since they also lived in the Charlottesville dreamworld.

The Blue Moon Diner was a small place—grill up front—a counter, I believe; but we always ate in the wooden booths to the side. I notice the reviews of the current restaurant talk about the service being “brusque”; can’t say I remember this, but it also seems (of course, tinged with 20 plus years of re-written memory) that there was so much going on during any visit to the Blue Moon Diner, that this would have been a minor consideration; also, again thru the lens of mythologized history, it seemed like every visit there lasted for days—not because of the service, but because there was so much to talk about, & the poetic life for folks of our ages was such a grand & dramatic adventure. Time was different then. Nor were visits to the Blue Moon always “fun”; I think my emotions while sitting in those booths ran a full spectrum, from great elation to abysmal despair—again, this was a time of poetry, & poetry for me has always involved a raw nerve or two—or two or three dozen—even when I didn’t have the technical savvy to really put that across.

One memorable moment at the Blue Moon Diner: there were three of us at a table for breakfast. A woman & I on one side of the booth—we were “just pals,” but quite good pals; a man on the other side, singing “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” to the woman, but not in a romantic way—in fact, he’s being rather disingenuous. The woman douses him with a full cup of coffee—since we’d been there for a while, fortunately the coffee was lukewarm—but the cup was full. I won’t reveal the man’s identity, but the woman was my good poebiz pal Brittany Newmark—she’s the one who actually coined the word “poebiz” (Brittany’s phrase, in re MFA programs: “You’ve heard of showbiz…. this is poebiz”) which I’ve completely co-opted—sorry, Brittany. Last I knew she’d married the love of her life, a guy from the Israeli equivalent of the Green Berets (which I think means he’s a pretty serious dude), & was living in Houston (where she was Hakeem Olajuwon’s composition teacher at the University of)…. oh, well between her love life & her place of residence, she was batting .500. Brittany was (& I hope & expect, still is) a very good poet, & was a good pal—just don’t get her riled when she’s holding a cuppa Joe.

So other than coffee & cigarettes (lots of both, & mostly Camel straights in terms of the latter) what was the fare? As I recall, the food was good, but in all honesty, I can only ever remember eating breakfast there (I’m sure I was there for other meals, but that’s a blank to me), & can only remember having French Toast & bacon. My memory tells me it was quite good—not that French Toast & bacon isn’t almost always good (it’s basically a perfect meal—the fluffy sweetness of the French Toast combined with the smoky, meaty crispness of bacon), but that it was particularly good. I see people still are fans of bacon from the Blue Moon diner….

So of course, like a lot of stuff I write these days, this is about memory—not much of a restaurant review. It was long ago & far away, but I can still see the plate of French Toast & bacon & the bright Virginia sunlight coming through the window & glinting off the maple syrup, I can still see the faces from those days in my mind. It’s the past, now, which belongs exclusively in memory….