pigeon

MEDIUM!? What kind of a man orders a MEDIUM fries and coke!?

I pulled the Gran Torino into the drive-in diner and parked by one of the menus. The fine dry gravel crunched under the tires. There was no AC and all the windows were already down. This was my favorite place to eat after work, on the way to — wherever it was I was going. Hadn’t decided yet. I liked the feeling of familiarity, ease, knowing what I wanted and how to get it. The civilized nature of it all: we’re adults. We know what to say and how to act. The machinery of society produces picturesque burgers with shiny buns, a crisscross of fries to the side, a coke in a bulbous glass. Well, OK, maybe it would be a paper cup since it’s take-out. I had the money, I would recieve the goods and services. I was a person. I existed. This is how things were supposed to work. This was crucial: if ordering a meal at a drive-in went not only flawlessy but effortlessly, not only effortlessly, but as an example of the kind of thing you don’t even notice is a thing you’re doing—

It seems as though there’s a class of actions or tasks one can perform that are, in a way, the opposite of “mindful,” and their very mindlessness makes them, perhaps, the most mindful of all. Did you ever find yourself contemplating whether or not other people thought as hard as you did about certain kinds of things? Things that are supposed to be emotionally neutral, pedestrian, mundane?

Perhaps I would never get to the point where placing my order at this quaint mid-century American roadside dining establishment would be truly frictionless as far as my prefrontal cortex and amygdala were concerned, but if I could at least generate the appearance of insouciance to any observer with merely mortal powers of perception and/or lack of interest in plying my psyche with any such superhuman powers as they may have in fact possessed, in other words, any observer whom I could reasonably expect to encounter in the course of ordinary life, or in front of whom I could reasonably be expected to pass as functionally, nominally human — if I could somehow manage to weave this surficially simple but semantically and culturally intricate collection of signs, signals, and salutations into the fabric of a contextually correct interaction behind a convincing façade, if only for the requisite moment, of socially appropriate mindlessness, then —

I let my left elbow hang rather jauntily out the driver’s side window. This felt right, like the sun, like inhabiting a body.

The saucy waitress sashayed up alongside, memo pad and ball point at the ready. “What’ll you have?” I was surprised she wasn’t chewing gum, but then she never chewed gum, because she had braces.

“Yeah, I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger, extra mustard, and a medium fries, and a medium coke.”

The saucy waitress dropped the pad to her waist and looked at me accusingly. “MEDIUM!? What kind of a man orders a MEDIUM fries and coke!?”

“Uh — yeah — I — all right, fine, make it a large!”

She seemed more or less satisfied, and wrote the order down. Muttering to herself, she hoofed it back up the narrow concrete walk. The screen door slammed behind her.

The sun was on its way to setting, on the far side of Broadway. The faint chill on the evening breeze picked up the essence of my grandma’s freshly watered petunias.

My brother came back out with my imaginary food, and we laughed about his role-playing skills — the mawkish southern accent he’d given the waitress!

I saw myself in the rearview mirror. I looked like a tawny little wild man. I wished I really could drive my dad’s station wagon. At nine years old, all I could legally do was honk the horn. But I didn’t, because that might remind someone to come out and tell my brother and me it was time to come inside, and we still had other stuff to do. Was there still time to walk to Fantle Park, where our spaceship was parked? Go in the garage and check the progress of the bones my brother had put in a mason jar of vinegar, to rubberize them? Play with my grandpa’s wooden box of assorted sewing machine parts? Or just wander, past the peach tree, down the alley, up and down the perfect, quiet, mindless mundane rows of houses.

I looked at Yankton in Maps, and it looks like that house is gone now. Like, completely gone, bulldozed, paved over — it looks like there’s a Subway there, if I’m remembering correctly which block of Broadway it was. The peach tree’s gone, the petunias are gone, the Gran Torino is gone, grandpa and grandma are gone of course.

Stating the obvious.

The park is still there, but satellite view reveals that the spaceship is gone — it must have taken off, left no trace, in search of extraterrestrial life. Or terrestrial life, that would do in a pinch, I suppose. Bon voyage and godspeed to its phantom crew.

I’m still here, for the moment at least. I still don’t always know what to say or how to act. I still spend too much time thinking about certain interactions that are supposed to be mindless. Does anybody not? Maybe it’s just different things for different people. But I’ve made some progress. I damn well order whatever size fries and coke I really want, I can tell you that much! Baby steps, am I right?

Y’all have a good night, now, and thanks for comin’ — see ya next time!