Memory

The wooden sign above the storefront says “Big Kahuna: Hawaiian Coffee and Smoothies”, but other than that, and the unusual length of the storefront itself, there’s nothing to distinguish it from the stores on either side; they’re all contained within the same peach-colored strip mall, and thus, share the same exterior décor. I’ve passed it twice before coming to stand outside it this third time: once in my car on the way to the parking lot in the center of town, and once on foot, as I walked south down Main Street towards the train station to see what there was to see. Now I stand squinting in the early morning sunlight and press my wrinkled nose up against the glass of the front door, shading my hand with my eyes to try to see inside (a pose referred to affectionately in the retail trade as the “Pocahontas”.) It doesn’t look open, but it’s impossible to imagine that any place purveying coffee of any sort would be closed at 7:30 AM on a weekday morning.

The door, by way of confirmation, gives easily to my touch. I shoulder my pack and venture through it.

Inside, the place is wide, but shallow, with sets of coffee-bar tables and high-legged stools running in a line down the length of the front windows. A cold case displaying sandwiches and juices stands directly in front of me. Behind it are all the dark metal boxes and hot glass containers associated with coffee brewing, and behind them, festive tiki-themed menus listing the various items for sale. A stout middle-aged woman in a blue Hawaiian shirt emerges from a set of swinging kitchen doors as I remove my sunglasses, greets me cordially. “Hello.” We two are the only ones in evidence.

“Hello,” I reply. I glance over the menus above her head cursorily and throw myself to the winds. “What do you recommend?” I ask her.

She raises an eyebrow, behind square glasses not unlike my own. “You’re looking for hot coffee? Cold coffee?” she asks.

“Hot coffee,” I say, smiling. Did I specify coffee? Must’ve been the part of the menu I was looking at…

“All our coffees are Hawaiian,” she explains, gesturing behind her. “And they’re all very smooth. They go in order from lightest roast at the top of the menu to darkest at the bottom. Kona’s the lightest.”

Cheeseburger in Paradise meets Starbucks! “Hmmm,” I ponder. As I am neither in the mood for a stomach-blasting infusion of super-darkness, nor generally in the mood for anything light, ever, I play it conservative. “Medium roast it is. Large, please,” I add.

“Room for milk?”

“Yep.” She turns her back to me and makes with the caffienated alchemy. I thought “Kona” was a specific type of bean, not a kind of roast. “You guys been here long?” I ask her.

She skips a beat at the question, as if she wasn’t expecting it, and pauses, holding my large medium-roast coffee and the lid thereof in separate hands. “A year last month,” she declares, with a nod of her head. She places the two items on the counter. “Anything else?”

A small ink-jet printed sign taped on the cold-case catches my eye. “One of the Breakfast Paninis,” I tell her.

“Six seventy-five,” she replies. I give her a twenty, and her eye lights on the pack dangling from my shoulder as she takes it. “You from around here?” she asks me.

“More or less,” I say, taking my change. “Used to live in the area. Haven’t been back in a while.” I scoop the coffee into my hand.

She takes it at face value. “Milk and sugar under the TV over there,” she says pointing. “Panini’ll be out in five minutes.”

Pharoah is a good-sized town that seems like a much smaller town, on account of being spread out over a wider area than is typical for Bluelaw County. My period of greatest familiarity with it spans roughly a decade, but the majority of the experiences were concentrated within a year or two of my time in college, when I had a friend named Darwin whose family lived there, and when I was dating my future wife Weaver, for whom all the towns in that part of Bluelaw were very much part of her family’s stomping grounds. They had a Japanese restaurant, at a time when you couldn’t get sushi on every street corner, and a movie theater that was old-fashioned enough to have a single screen and a mural of Revolutionary War heroes in the lobby instead of film stars. They had the training center for the Police and Fire Academies. They had a hair salon where I used to get my hair cut, because it was the same place that Weaver got her hair cut, and where the stylist gave me a cassette tape of Saturday Morning Cartoon Theme Songs that Jack still likes to listen to in the car. And really, that was about as far as my consideration of it went. It never impressed itself on me as a place that was good to be, or desirable to be. And when the divorce came, when Darwin, who had always been sweet on Weaver anyway, flew away from me and to her side, when I abandoned Ivory Grove and Bluelaw County and all the rest of it and staggered away to Sealand to die, I swept Pharoah into the dustbin along with everything else, without much remorse.

Life has a way of surprising you, though. One of my more recent surprises has been my left eyelid, which has picked up the enchanting habit of sticking to my left cornea as I sleep, causing it to tear pieces off the surface of my eyeball when I open it. On one fine Sunday morning after it had been doing this in particular earnest, and when it was terribly inconvenient for my regular opthamologist to be in her office, the emergency doctor was located, lo!- in distant Pharoah. I decided I liked her better, and so, as on this morning, I have now returned to the town several times to receive her ministrations. I have discovered in the process that, to no-one’s surprise but my own, Pharoah has continued to exist, even in the absence of my attentions. And to evolve. And perhaps even, to thrive.

I sit down on one of the high-legged stools, drop my pack nearby and fish out my softcover copy of Jeff Shaara’s The Rising Tide, taking my first sip of the coffee as I do so. Yeesh! I think, recoiling. ‘Smooth’ might be a bit of an overstatement. I roll my tongue painfully around the inside of my mouth, trying not to wince. And if that’s Medium, I’d hate to taste Dark.

My appointment is scheduled for 9:10 AM. There is no way to arrive in Pharoah from Sealand at 9:10 AM, because the only direct connections between the two are three-lane highways that are choked with rush-hour traffic from 8 AM to 9:30. As this is the case, I chose instead to leave Sealand at 7:00 AM and arrive here at 7:30. I have spent the time between my arrival and now wandering up and down Main Street, looking at the closed storefronts, reading the unfamiliar names, watching the commuters stroll lazily across the streets and out of the parking lots to mass at the open-air train platform nearby. Washed in the bright summer sunshine, devoid of the rush-hour madness scant miles away, it seems peaceful and good and happy. And most surprisingly of all, untainted. I look within my heart, think back to what I was when I was here, those things I did, and the memories are powerless: nothing but echoes, neither good nor bad.

Is this what it would be like if I practiced meditation? I wonder, staring out the window at the movie theatre, right across the street. The pain and the sadness and the shame about what’s been, and the worry about what might be, all fallen away, and the world just- abiding? Neither more nor less than what it is? I place the book in my lap. Or is it just that in all that time I never truly did anything here that really mattered to me?

The woman from the counter swings by the table and slides a green plastic basket across the marble towards me. The sandwich within is enormous; it fills the basket to overflowing, even cut into two pieces and overlapped. I pick up one steaming half of it gingerly, taking care not to burn myself, take a few small bites. We seem to need memories, on some level. People with memory impairment, people with amnesia or other disorders aren’t happy. They-

The panini sandwich is REALLY good. The outside of the bread is cracker-crispy; the inside of the bread and the eggs are light and fluffy and delicate on the tongue. The cheese is molten and tangy, and the ham is fine-shaven like deli proscuitto: just salty enough to accent the cheese and eggs, without being overbearing.

They-

I take another bite.

Aw, screw it, I think, taking another sip of the coffee to wash it all down. Sometimes there’s no moral. You just get a good panini.