I am beginning a glass of La Posta, a Malbec glass. As parallels a game of Russian Roulette, I allowed my bartender to pick my glass of red. He poured his favorite, meaning the Malbec showed up in my life with no contrivance from myself. I love Douglas and I sneak here to write at Respite Cafe. Which closed at 6:00 PM tonight after serving me an eight dollar bowl of Mulligantawny. Winter hours. It was good, homemade, but not eight dollars a bowl good. However, I am not to ask the house for a mulligan. A visit to Douglas recalls death to me, three deaths foremost, but one death recalls entirely the possibility of all deaths. First, I remember in 2005 stumbling into a gallery, now the Kubiak Gallery, and a lawyer named Scott was laboring on a canvas thick with paint. Three years later, I learned the man perished behind the wheel when his car slid before a freighter laden with carrots. I heard of the passing on the visit to Kubiak's. The incident I found briefly noted in a small, online Allegan County newsletter. The event received precious little ink. The third, the news arrived by email, sent by a woman who coordinates a newsletter for our high school graduating glass. The former athletic director during our years of attendance, 1977 to 1981, had passed away in Douglas but had retired to a home in Galesburg. I almost went looking for the death certificate on his passing and still might. I liked the man, even enjoyed seeing him at another high school when I was substitute teaching, after graduating college. I often wondered about rumors that he moved along after being caught in flagrante delicto with a female faculty member in the guidance office. I had a flutter for that female faculty member back when she taught my English class junior year, so I understood totally.
I discussed number one and then three because number two in the order of time pains me the most. On Sunday, August Seventh, 2011, my waitress brought me, unselected by me, a glass of Malbec on the sultry backyard patio of Everyday Peeople Cafe. Theresa Perez of the local Jazz group, Hats, was performing marvelous Jazz standards as dark fell. A woman I met a week earlier at an outdoors party was texting me, a woman who had yet to ask me out but I knew it was a matter of time. She was a short drive away but the texting didn't get that hot. And so I didn't place a Sunday call to mums and pops. It was the last evening a simple Sunday call to mums and pops would be possible. On the morning of the Eighth, a stroke befell my father as he filled his birdfeeders. I wished I had called.
Sex fills the air today in Douglas and Valentine's day is all about love, theoretical and physical. At the coffeehouse, a woman insisted on buying me a coffee. When I said I had ordered one, she insisted on buying me a biscotti. I accepted. And then she took a table and began handwriting her physical therapy case notes. I once had slept all winter long with a woman trained in physical therapy and I must vouch for how inventive that training makes a practitioner in the boudoir. I also could help to see how her endowments strained the top of her sports jersey. I thanked her for the biscotti and walked back to my car.
On the way back, I saw a tall woman in a tight pair of blue jeans closing up shop. I had talked to her the week before at the Everyday People Cafe bartop, and she had confessed she hadn't been asked on a date in four years. It was dinnertime and Salt of the Earth so close in neighboring Fennville. All it would have taken was a bit of cheek to ask her if she were hungry, a catcall across Butler Street. At least I could have given her the chance to say no. Two signs how totally I have disconnected myself from the flow of life. Here at the counter of Everyday People Cafe, the flow of life is seemingly stilled, yet unavoidable.
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