ORDINARY BEAUTY, MODEST MIRACLES:
Max’s Travel Journal, summer ’08
St. Louis, then to New Orleans via Amtrak, then on to LA.


CHAPTER ONE: On Past the Far Edge of the Usual

     After our customary Saturday brunch at Swad, a wonderful Indian restaurant in Lafayette, California, Barbie drove me a couple blocks to the BART station. Clinging to one another as we embraced, we said farewell for a little more than a week. The train took me to its Fruitville station in Oakland, and a shuttle bus went the rest of the way to the airport. In around 45 minutes, I was there.

BART Train/Bus to Oakland Airport

1.
Mobile! All the staid
bodies stuck to the sidewalk
peeled off now, lifted up
and set back down
free to roam.
Schedules shredded,
shadows dispatched,

free to imagine
who they are,
free  to hunt down
their better selves.

2.
The sky, the sky,
always calling us,
begging us,
screaming at us:
“Now, you fools! Waft up here
like incense, and disappear!”


Oakland Airport: the Incident

     It’s a perfect Saturday afternoon for flying, almost too perfect. It only took five minutes to check in. Looks like about a ten minute wait in the Security line. I’m half way to the metal detector, dreaming away, when suddenly a white-shirted guard, just on the other side of the machines, shouts something and starts to run!
     Three more guards break into runs. The air tenses. I ask the man next to me what the guard yelled. The man says, “Bomb!”
     They close off the metal detector. This stops our forward movement, of course, and we stand where we are in the winding maze.
     What are we in for? The running security guards all seem to have converged on a heavyset woman wearing a halter top. But it’s just beyond the range of what I can see clearly.

     Back home, Barbie and I recently finished watching a DVD of Battle of Algiers, the classic film about the guerilla war in the '50s between Algerians and French colonials. The film included scenes of people in the European Quarter, living the good life in an upscale bar or cafe when suddenly the whole place explodes into hell!

     In a minute or two the guard near us removes the strap from the metal detector and says, “OK, you can go ahead now.” The conveyor starts up again.
     “So what happened?” I ask a guard walking past as I sit and put my shoes back on after going through.
     “A drill,” he says, but another guard with him just shrugs.
     A little later, one of the sheriff’s men at his little station against the wall concurs it really was a test.
     I resume my pleasant, perfect-afternoon dream.

Walking the Concourse

On one side
the Crane window,
eighty mighty flying birds
red and white and black
etched into glass.

Across the vestibule,
the green water.

This body’s too small a room!
These eyes, tired of confinement.
Break free, break free now,
eyes, get out of here!
Grab your wings and soar!

In the Air: Turbulence

     Forty-five minutes into our flight the hostess brings me a coffee. Just as I’ve mixed Equal and creamer in, the plane hits a pocket of turbulence more disconcerting than any I’ve ever encountered. The coffee’s dancing in the full paper cup. I start to do a balancing act, like a juggler, but it’s like a competition between the hot liquid and me. Whatever I do to contain the stuff, it attempts to rhumba beyond, as though it has some wily consciousness of its own.
     The coffee sloshes over the top, wetting my pants and the tray. The turbulence continues and increases. What was amusing begins to feel ominous. It seems the whole cup is about to shake out all around me, and I’m sitting next to a girl wearing shorts! The library book I’m reading is already speckled brown. Plus, I feel I’m making a fool of myself, revealing myself as a big slob.
     There’s only one thing I can do. I dump my coffee, cup and all, into the big plastic glass of ice I’m still nursing from the diet coke I'd had at the airport! The coffee is contained—fortunately, for the turbulence continues. A small child up front has started to scream and squawk in ways that sound more like a terrified cockatoo than a human being.
     Finally the shaking subsides. The only thing I’m really sorry about is my book. Pages 109-113 of News of the Spirit, an excellent short story collection by Lee Smith, will forever bear little splotches of brown. The possibility of future readers being distracted when they arrive at these very moving pages of the powerful long story, “Live Bottomless”, practically makes me weep.

Montage: Out the Window

Desert road
arrow to the horizon
shortest distance
to nowhere

Mountain peaks white
like teeth of dragons
buried upside down.

Folded hills, a lumpy
green bedspread—for whom?—
yield to bleached sand hills
like huge, buried bones
partly covered in brown mold.

Nature’s a dance,
A crazy dance!

Somewhere in Utah,
baseball diamonds in the desert
for miles where there are no people.
Hall of fame games, played by ghosts.

Nature progresses theme by theme,
one pattern sometimes easing into the next,
sometimes plunging abruptly.

Like a false dawn we pass
a hundred miles of patchwork fields.
Kansas, I think, but then
the brown-red desert returns.

Now below us, Earth
is simply vanishing,
becoming mist
beneath the sunset sky:

now yellow,
now pink,
now purple

now gray

and now it’s gone.

June 22, first day in St. Louis

At the Courtesy Diner

     There’s something truly scary in the loud voice of a drunk. There's an edge there that lets you know the person is out of control. The voice toboggans along its high volume track, such emphasis being uncalled for by the content. From time to time it flashes a generalized anger like a knife blade. There’s really no one conscious at home. One had best stay out of the way.
     I started thinking these thoughts not long after parking in front of the Courtesy Diner, just off the freeway in midtown, and taking a seat at the counter for breakfast. It was around 6 AM, Sunday morning.
     As I settled into my seat and started to read the paper, I became aware of a certain chaos around me. Hank, Jr. was playing on the jukebox. Strips of bacon sizzled loudly on the grill. Mostly, though, I heard loud voices behind me. I looked up from my Post-Dispatch, craned my neck, and saw four huge guys in a booth in the corner —how’d they even fit?—obviously still drunk from the night just past. At the other end of the place was another booth of all-nighters, two college-age guys bragging away to their dates, who seemed to be patiently, soberly listening.
     I’d already ordered, and so took a sip of coffee and kept reading as I awaited my food. A moment later some great commotion arose, followed by a breeze at my back. I looked up again and saw that one of the four from the booth, along with a big bruiser from another table, had run out the door and were fighting in the parking lot like two tanks.
      I’d heard about fights breaking out in bars, of course. Not frequenting such places, I’d never seen one. Now, here at the Courtesy Diner—reminding me of those comic strip cartoons with people sailing out the doors and windows of FRIENDLY’S BAR—I was witnessing my first brawl! It was truly frightening. The two hunks of meat were trying to really hurt each another. One of them punched the other straight in the face and drew blood. They grabbed onto one another like prehistoric monsters, and toppled heavily to the asphalt. A pleading woman tried to pull one of them off. Four or five other men had gone out there and stood around the two gladiators, but had no luck getting them to make peace.
     I watched all this through the picture window from my ringside seat. Everyone was tense. Would others take sides? Were even the cars safe? I saw the man behind the counter pick up a phone and assumed he was calling the cops. But before anyone got there, the thing ended somehow.  Everyone began filing back in, and for awhile the place was louder than ever. Then the four crazed ones from the back paid and left. By the time I finished my breakfast, the only other customers left were the two guys still braying to their girls. Their voices too seemed to careen recklessly at that inexplicable “anger point”, and I felt vaguely threatened until I finished my meal.
     As I paid, I asked the waitress, “Does this happen a lot here?”
     “Not at this time of day,” she said. “Usually at night”.
     I imagined what it must be like working at a place where fights like this break out regularly. Why here? I’d remembered the Midwest as fairly civilized.
     I got in my car and continued east to a coffeehouse where I could work on the laptop. It will probably be awhile before I return to the Courtesy Diner.

On Visiting Missouri in Flood Time

     Where I live in California, we’re having a drought while here in the Midwest, thousands or millions of acres of crops are being drowned in a flood. And no way to send the excess water west! You’d think it could just flow into a tilted pipe, or something, but I guess that’s easier to imagine than to create.
     Anyway, I’d heard and read so much about the flood that I wanted to be sure and catch a shot of the crest of the Mississippi. So here you are:

That’s the top of a STOP sign, down there in the river.

     I hope such levity doesn’t offend anyone. Within the context of the seriousness of the situation, maybe a little humor can be a small relief?

A Moment

   A lucky shot, while walking by a piece of public art in the plaza outside Delmar Loop Market, University City.

on to Chapter Two
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