Junction Boulevard

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I call this blog Still Amazed because every day I am.  As ol’ Everett Ruess said, “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.” 

But sometimes it’s the little things that trip me into amazement’s realm.

Like this morning, when I wandered into Polly’s Pie, a prosaic sort of restaurant across the parking lot from the motel where we were staying in Orange County. It’s a scrambled eggs and hash brown breakfast kind of place, a setting for quick business lunches and senior citizen specials, and as the name suggests, it serves up a variety of pies. It lacks the character of a true diner, but I think it has diner somewhere in its genes.

Anyway, I walked in for a cup of coffee with the book I am currently reading, which happens to be Light In August. The guy who brought me my coffee is someone I have seen working in there for years bussing tables, getting people seated, filling up the water glasses. He talks in a slow and slightly awkward way and has the mannerism of someone with a mild developmental disability. He always strikes me as conscientious but challenged, doing his best at a simple job, certainly not a person with much literary awareness.  And there I was making assumptions.

He glanced at the book on the table. “Faulkner, eh? Don't you find his prose a little difficult at times? I just finished Intruder in the Dust. I'd rather read his short stories. I found a good collection recently that I really liked.”

That's what I mean. Unexpected. Interesting. Wonderful.

Then there was an odd little moment with my mother -- and those who know me, through real life or the blog, know how much OY VAY the term, “my mother” implies. But I went to look in on her yesterday and she was telling me how much more limited her walking radius has become since the days when she'd walk all the way to Junction Boulevard.

“Junction Boulevard?” I asked. It’s certainly not a street that appears in my personal geography.

Well, I looked it up this morning. It’s in Corona, Queens. My mother lived in Corona during the 1930s and early 1940s. It seemed such a strange frame of reference -- the clarity of Corona against an increasingly confused and blurry now.I think what swept over me and filled my heart is called compassion. And so much is wondrous through that lens of compassion, but it's tinged with sadness too. I guess that's just how it feels to be alive.

Rilke again: “only at times, the curtain of the pupil rises/an image enters in, rushes through/the tightened silence of the shoulders/reaches the heart, and dies.”

Almost more beauty than one can bear.