Waffle House after Midnight

 

I want to meet you after midnight 

inside the east side Waffle House.

We’ll sit in a booth facing each other

and sip coffee at that ungodly hour.

The world will be sleeping and 

unaware of our secret rendezvous.

Outside the large windows the glow 

of colored lights will melt and run

as the sky opens up in a deluge

of truly biblical proportions.

We are a pair, male and female,

like in the story of the great flood,

safe inside the ark of salvation.

Will you meet me at Waffle House after midnight?

***

This Beautiful Now

Driving with the windows down

and a popsicle in my hand. 

It is the cool of the evening
after a muggy day.

The cicadas are singing
over the drone of the engine.

I am going to pickup my daughter
at field hockey practice.

There are maybe twenty girls
on the turf field lining up
to make shots on goal.

The sky above them is filled
with massive clouds
that are gradations
of pale blues and grays
with a few glowy pink spots.

Memories try to push into my
conscious awareness but
I push them back.

I want to be in this beautiful now
where time is arrested
by the senses.

***

“Chernobus”

July 17th, 2026 - widespread fires from Canada has engulfed our city in dense smoke and barely breathable air.

My son just sent me this photo he took this morning while driving to his summer internship on the other side of Columbus.  He, my daughter, and I are watching “Chernobyl” on HBO and they are captivated by the whole phenomenon that played out at the end of my junior year of high school in the Ukraine.  We’re only two episodes in and they have been asking me a ton of questions about the time period and its cultural context.  

I am thoroughly enjoying it because I was a History and Political Science major at a conservative college where the Soviet Union was their favorite whipping boy and its dissolution was still a few years in the future.  And when I say “thoroughly enjoying it” I am well aware of the contradiction that that poses considering the horror of the situation and the potential it had for making a large swath of that region, to include western European countries, uninhabitable.

So my son sends me “Chernobus” and I can’t help but LOL at the creative spin he has put on this dark series we are watching together, tying it to our current pollution calamity where heavy smoke from Canadian fires has descended on our city.  He shared it in the chat that includes my daughter and so she added to the surreality of it by posting her own photo of a lifeguard getting ready to go out to the pool where she works.  These are strange times we live in…

***

Waffle House at Night

 

I walked through the door from the garage after a typical day’s work at the hospital, took off my shoes, and set my keys on the desk in the den.  Standing in the opposite doorway with the front door behind her stood my wife, a large box at her feet.  She had a curious smile on her face that threw me off.  It is a particular expression that I am not used to getting from her.  She gestured at the box and asked me what it was.

I had no idea what it was.  She and my daughter are the ones who get packages through the mail, not me.  I acted nonchalant about it but was intrigued.  When she left to pick up our daughter at school I double checked the label to make sure it was for me.  The sender was a friend and fellow psychiatrist which dialed up the intrigue for me even further.  We share common interests in writing and art (clues perhaps?).

I picked up the sizable box and took it to the dining room to begin the unboxing process.  It was securely taped and took some doing to get it open.  Inside was bubble wrap surrounding another box, also securely taped.  The suspense was building as I broke taped edge after taped edge.  Inside the inside box was more bubble wrap.   Was it something made of glass?  The wrapping materials were all over the table.

After what seemed like several minutes of careful work I found a 12x12 black square that turned out to be the back of a frame.  I gingerly flipped it over and found an image of my friend’s Waffle House painting that I’d admired from afar on Instagram.  My first thought was that he’d framed a print as a thoughtful gesture, but then the light glinted off it’s uneven surface and I realized it was the painting itself.  No way!

I let out a loud bark-like laugh and then just took it in: the brush strokes, the lit interior details, the glowing effect of street lights at night.  I took me back to days spent with Kevin McCarty, my friend and godson, in his studio apartment that was literally an art studio with paintings stacked against the walls and his easel in the middle of the room.  I breathed in the smell of turpentine and walked over his paint-speckled floorboards.

The Waffle House holds special meaning for me.  My daughter and I flew to Florida a few years back for a field hockey tournament and we arrived at the hotel some time after midnight.  It was unseasonably cold; we were hungry and tired.  Across the parking lot was a Waffle House.  Inside was an elderly man at the cash register who peeked over his newspaper and pointed at a booth.  A waiter came 30 minutes later.

It was an odd slice of life that she was not familiar with at her young age considering the late hour, the dingy booths, the greasy food, and the paucity of employees.  Kevin liked visiting these kinds of places and befriending whoever might be there.  He even convinced a local greasy-spoon owner to let him set up his easel and paint some patrons who volunteered to sit for it.  So much caught up in so little a painting.  

***

Today is My Day to Escape

 

Today is my day to escape.

I will rise up through the ceiling

in search of elusive healing.

Knowing too well I’m a broken body

whose soul is sad and also shoddy.

I need to stay and do the work

where sins and sighings darkly lurk.

My feet forced to the flaming fire.

Truth comes out (surprise) a liar.

Sometimes it is too much to bear,

I look to flee from pain, despair.

Today is my day to escape.

But I’ll be back to try again

to try to make a loss a win.

***

Play-doh

 

When you are sitting across from someone 

try hard to hear what they are saying to you. 

Take it in, work with it, suppress any emotions

that attempt to well up and seize your mind.

They have handed you a piece of play-doh.

Move it around in your hand, look at it from

different angles, imagine what it could be 

from a shared perspective of love & respect.

Your response can make it ugly or beautiful.

Your patience & humility can bring disparate

elements together to change you and the

person you are desperate to understand.

***

I Dreamt I was a Child Again

 

I dreamt I was a child again,

when fun wasn’t a wasteful sin.

I circled the sky in a ferris wheel,

accepting what was and wasn’t real.

Senses filled with smells and sights, 

heavenly thrills with earthly frights.

It was a place I longed to be, 

where hatred costs but love is free.

***

There Will Come Soft Rains

"Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is..."

This is the final line of “There Will Come Soft Rains”, a short story by Ray Bradbury written in 1950 under the dark pall of *mutually assured destruction*, a concept that created a chilling impasse between the US and the Soviet Union known as “The Cold War”.  It came down to: if you nuke us, we will nuke you, so don’t nuke us.  

The fear of a nuclear holocaust was felt acutely even up through the 70’s and early 80’s which encompassed my formative years.  It was a popular subject in books, movies, and TV.  I was reading things like On the Beach, Swan Song, and Damnation Alley.  Years later I picked up A Canticle for Leibowitz and The Postman.  I specifically remember watching a TV mini-series called “The Day After” with trepidation.  According to the internet it was watched by 100 million Americans on ABC in 1983.  I was 14 years old and perhaps all of this explains my melancholy nature, at least in part.  

In this short story a nuclear war has finally happened and a fully automated house remains intact amongst the death and destruction surrounding it.  People are dead and gone but their routines live on briefly through this house.  The link below is the story in its entirety.  And yes, today is August 5, 2026.

There Will Come Soft Rains

Glen Hansard has Passed

 

What sad and shocking news to hear Glen Hansard left us this morning for the world to come.

He came onto my radar back in 2007 with the indie film “Once” where I found him and his music partner Markéta Irglová acting opposite each other despite the fact neither were actors.  That movie had an undeniable charm and the music was amazing.  My wife and I became instant fans and bought the soundtrack to the film and their two albums together as The Swell Season as they came out.

We watched the budding of their romance and bought the documentary about it on CD which is somewhere in the basement on a shelf last I saw it.  At that time I was just back from my deployment to Iraq and under the stress of transitioning to becoming the commander of our Combat Stress Control unit.  Glen and Markéta’s music was such a consolation and a soothing presence in my life at that time.

In 2008 we watched the Academy Awards because they were up for Best Original Song - the oh so lovely “Falling Slowly”.  It was up against three songs from “Enchanted” - quite the David & Goliath situation with the Disney juggernaut on one side and their quiet duet on the other.  We sat through the Disney numbers with the stage full of people dancing and spinning about to fully orchestrated music.  It was quite the spectacle.  But when it was time for the performance of “Falling Slowly” the massive stage was empty except for Markéta at a piano and Glen on a stool with his guitar.  The contrast was stunning.  The moment was magical and unforgettable.

And miracle upon miracle it won the award!  Markéta gave a quiet yet rousing speech about the importance of art coming from the little people (my summation from poor memory but the feeling of it I think).  It was split in two because her first go at it was interrupted by the music swelling in to signal the end when she wasn’t nearly finished.  She looked unsure of what to do, stammered, and then stopped.  It was awkward.  When the commercials were over and it cut back to the show the MC (Jon Stewart) walked Markéta back to the mic and allowed her to finish her comments in full.  It was such a gracious and kind-hearted gesture.

She and Glen only made two albums as The Swell Season and then their relationship, both personal and professional, came to an end at some point.  Almost 20 years later in 2025 they reunited for another album, but now Glen is no longer with us.  His sweet and melancholy spirit will be missed but remembered in his music.

***

All is Quiet on Outpost Europa

 

The waves lap around Outpost Europa

where thermal vents have melted the ice.

The sky is dominated by the swirling might

of the King of the Gods, a celestial gravitas.

I lie small and unnoticed, secured to a cot,

sleep elusive while gazing out the porthole.

Mother Earth is five hundred million miles away,

cacophonous, but all is quiet on Outpost Europa.

***

Intellivision

 

I saw an advertisement for Intellivision today on Facebook as a retro-offering and was instantly transported back to late elementary school in my mind.

I had a friend with an Atari 2600 which was beginning to saturate the market for home video game systems in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  It was not cheap ($199) and so despite its popularity there were not a lot of kids who owned one in our small town.  My friend lived out in the country a good ways, but that did not stop me from riding my bike out there over hill and dale on gravel roads with the sun beating down.  I had some serious envy issues considering I had to otherwise ride around town to various places to find the large standalone video games that cost a quarter a game.  You could blow through an allowance really quick in an arcade, especially if you weren’t yet very good at the game.  Some of my favorites were Missile Command, Robotron, Defender, Qix and Q-bert.

So imagine my surprise when my dad returned home from a business trip to Chicago with an Intellivision gaming console under his arm.  It was a convention for carpet installers and he had won it in a game or raffle of some kind.  I was excited but also confused.  What exactly was an “Intellivision”?  The controllers were more complex than the Atari 2600 and the games more sophisticated.  

My favorite was called “Utopia” where you and a friend had an island each surrounded by water.  The goal was to build up a successful civilization which included the possibility of eventually invading the opponent’s island if you had enough money and resources to do it.  Every 15 minutes or so a large rotating rectangular-shaped object that represented a hurricane would appear at the top of the screen and randomly spin itself down through the two islands and whatever it touched (houses, crops, castles, soldiers, factories, hospitals, etc) would be destroyed, ie, disappear from the screen.  It took a long time to play compared to most video games and required the ability to plan and strategize about the future of your island.  I loved it!

I came to realize from the types of games available and the better graphics that the Intellivision was a bit highbrow compared to the Atari 2600.  The downside was that there were not nearly as many games available for it and as far as I knew I was the only kid in my town that had one, which meant there was no trading or borrowing of games possible.  I ran into a similar problem many years later when my job provided a Blackberry phone and I bought a Blackberry tablet as well.  I loved that tablet.  It was a beautiful piece of technology but there were so few apps for it and eventually it died out along with their phones when the iPhone and iPad took over the market.

In the 45 years or so since that time I have built some things of my own in a sort of search for a Utopia.  I am not on an island and I have not been hit by a hurricane but I’ve had to meet and overcome some significant challenges that had the potential to be catastrophic, especially early on.  And at this very moment I am wondering why there were no churches to be built in the game?  I can’t begin to imagine what my life would have been like without the Faith to sustain it.  

***