Cravings...
Cravings #1
Early Sunday morning, my wife and I stepped into our Ford Edge and drove the twenty or so miles from our home in Gilmanton, NH to a little restaurant, a diner really, next to the airport in Gilford, “Cravings.”
We want breakfast, and while this place is a bit more expensive than other, closer places to which we might have driven, we end up here most Sunday mornings. We arrive before the brunch crowd. We are not “the brunch crowd.” Sundays for us are work days, mostly -- around the home, mowing lawns, clearing brush, replanting boxwoods, chipping ice from the driveway.
And so we arrive at the restaurant at 8:30. Plenty of tables wait for us. We sit. Order. Sip coffee (hers decaf).
We like this place in part because of the food -- a great Irish Benedict and French omelettes -- but also because the hundreds of photos (some in color, but most in black & white) adorning its walls transport us back to life around Lake Winnipesaukee even before we were born. A simpler time, maybe. Sawmills, hay bales stacked higher than the roofs of the barns in which the hay will spend the winter months, T-bars pulling skiers in knickers, ice harvesting, horse-drawn plows, family portraits in front of the Depression era automobiles, no one smiling.
Sitting among these photos we talk about our lives, about work, about our children and grandchildren. And we talk about the photographs. We ask each other about blueberry picking on Belknap Mountain, snowmobiling under the stars to the Castle in the Clouds. This little restaurant brings us back to our lives as children -- no mortgages, no TPS reports to file, no worries about those whom we have created and love more than we love anyone in our lives.
We finish our breakfast, say goodbye to childhood, step back into the Edge and head back into our lives as adults in our late 50’s.
“Yes or no,” I dare as we turn onto the Laconia Bypass.
“Okay,” she says, game as always.
“Do you love your job?”
“Yes.”
“Do you need your job?”
“Yes.”
“Do you ever feel you are a cog in an economic machine built for someone else’s benefit?” (I actually asked that question!)
“Yes.”
“Do you want to escape this system?”
“Yes, but....”
And so we talk about the “but.” We both love our work with teenagers, with colleagues. We relish the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives, and we know that one-on-one, our work can be important. Only from time to time do we find this responsibility excessively burdensome.
But -- the other side of the truth is that we need our jobs, or think we do -- mortgages to pay, futures to manage, health insurance to bubble-wrap around us. Trapped. Yes, it sometimes feels as if this economic system has trapped us into feeding it instead of the other way around.
Our conversation continues.... We allow, “Yes we are among the lucky” We have jobs, a home, insurance, a future with our children and grandchildren. Lucky. Lucky.
As we head south on Rte. 107, I think, “Lucky,” like the winner of an umpteen million dollar PowerBall lottery. Can you imagine? With each WMUR News broadcast tracking the growing lottery prize for the next drawing, I wonder more ardently than the time before, “What would it be like to win that?” Freedom. I smile at the thought.
When I read Frost’s poem “Roadside Stand,” I empathize with the pathetic roadside stand, an attempt to hustle some “the money, the cash, whose flow supports / The flower of cities from sinking and withering faint.”
But -- I also empathize with the speaker. How different, really, is my longing for a winning lottery ticket from the sorrowful, unspoken yearning
...for some city money to feel in hand To try if it will not make our being expand, And give us the life of the moving-pictures’ promise That the party in power is said to be keeping from us?
I’m embarrassed by my own yearning.
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Cravings #2
As if I am back at Cravings, sitting across the table from my wife, remembering together, I hear a Daryll Hall and John Oates lyric:
They sat in an abandoned luncheonette
Sipping imaginary cola and drawing faces in the tabletop dust
His voice was rusty from years as a sergeant on "this man's army"
They were old and crusty
She was twenty when the diner was a baby
He was the dishwasher, busy in the back, his hands covered with gravy
Hair black and wavy
Brilliantine slick, a pot - cleaning dandy
He was young and randy
Day to day, to day... today
Then they were old, their lives wasted away
Month to month, year to year
They all run together
Time measured by the peeling of paint on the luncheonette wall
They sat together in the empty diner
Filled with cracked china
Old news was blowing across the filthy floor
And the sign on the door read "this way out", that's all it read
That's all it said.
When I first heard that lyric I was not yet 20, closer to fifteen than 20. I too worked in restaurants -- dishwasher, line cook, maitre de, bartender. Back then, I imagined one day being “old and crusty,” the age I am now. I imagined returning to one of the restaurants I worked in, sitting across a table from the woman who would chose to be with me. Even now, more than fifty years after hearing the lyric for the first time, when I call upon them, the first and second verses always comes to me holding hands -- the image of two, a man and a woman, a dusty luncheonette counter, their youth, their getting together. And I always remember the bridge..., “Day to day...,” and, to my adolescent brain, the very cool, ominously symbolic, “time measured by the peeling of paint on the luncheonette walls.” Wo!
It is the final stanza I struggle to recall, and, now after my Sunday morning’s at Cravings and after my close reading of Frost’s poem, I get why. I see the empty diner, the cracked china, the old newspapers and the exit sign. Then, at fifteen, or twenty, or twenty five, or even thirty-five, I didn’t feel the truth of the lyric’s final line, “That’s all it said.” That final truth pushes Frost’s speaker to imagine his own exit, his own way out in the poem’s last stanza.
“This way folks,” the maitre de says at a fine restaurant. “This way out” death says. That’s all. I’m kind of glad I didn’t hear “all that” when I was fifteen, or twenty. I’m glad I hear it now.
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Cravings #3
Today, I was asked this question by a friend. We were talking about our lives as teachers, no longer father figures to our students, but grandfather figures. He recalls a Dharma talk when a dying lama says to his students, “I am afraid.” So my friend turns more squarely to me. “It’s a good question. What are you afraid of?”
I’m afraid of being dismissed as irrelevant, but less so than I was five years ago.
I’m afraid someone I love will be stricken with irreparable misfortune. This is a fear I’ve known intimately since the day I married. It intensified when my children were born. And it is more intense now that I have grandchildren to love. Now that I think about it, even at age five or six I was kept awake by the thought of my parents’ death, afraid they would leave me at a point in my life when I couldn’t handle it. Math would put me to sleep -- My grandfather died at 72. When my parents turned the same age, I would be old enough to handle his death. -- And with the math done, I could sleep. My dad died when he was 72, my mother at 92. I was not ready.
I once was afraid I would be found a fraud by those who love me, by those whom I respect, and by those with whom I live and work. I’m far less afraid to be found out than I was even a year ago.
I’m afraid of getting it wrong -- the rest of my life. Is it a luxury of the middle class to be unafraid of falling into a life of poverty? A luxury of the naive? Of the truly humble. I wish I knew, but I don’t, and that scares me some.
To live simply is to live gently, keeping in mind always the needs of the planet, other creatures, and the generations to come. In doing his we lose nothing, because the interests of the whole naturally include our own. . . . In claiming nothing for [ourselves, we] have everything, for everything is [ours] to enjoy as part of the whole.
Eknath Easwaran, Original Goodness: On the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Nilgiri Press: 1996), 93, 94. From Richard Rohr’s
, January 31, 2018