Been thinking about…The thick white carpet

Another Sunday night, and sundown — not far off this time — waits impatiently. The western sky is nothing but deepening reds. The edge of the known world ends here with close-cut grass, brown and dry at the end of a three-month drought. The edge of the known world is fenced in the black silhouette of rustling dry corn in the thinness of the evening. This grass should be sharp against my bare feet — and I should be barefoot in heat like this — but I can only feel the discomfort of shiny black dress shoes. A childhood of running barefoot in the green, glorious grass, reduced to this? Such is an indignity. The long ago past should be today, not 40, not 50, not 60 years ago. No one tells you a lifetime passes so quickly.

The corn is rustling again in the breeze, but even the breeze is oppressively hot. The black cars in the drive are shiny, the long and low brick building waits behind me, white portico beckoning, dark brick also hot from the afternoon sun. I feel myself turning on my heels, sense of murmured voices nearby, shades of past and present in ill-garnered suit coats. This flatland is familiar as it is strange, not unlike the wide, sandy riverbeds of home. There, the river bluffs covered in oak rose in the west. Here, far off, ancient mountains line the borderland edge of the known world. And here, classic fast food’s neon arches light a darkened eastern sky. Were it not for all this corn, I could see the restaurant from here. Little doubt a few families visiting tonight will stop in for supper after this moment has passed. Their lives will remain unchanged by this night.

The big double doors are painted chocolate brown. Inside, the air is hushed and cool. My should-be bare feet trapped in uncomfortable black dress shoes sink into thick white carpet that is lush beyond the years. The decor, meant to be comforting, manages only to be modern and contradictorily rustic, round mirrors and things resembling liquor cabinets are dark and blackened against long ranch-style walls of cold white. Somewhere, oddly enough, wafts the smell of fried pork chops with mashed potatoes and homemade gravy. It is the overlay of lives lived, of an October afternoon in the full heat of summer, and cold air conditioning back then too, as my grandparents liked to keep their house cool, too, especially when grandma had been cooking.

Uncharacteristically, the room I am in is empty, only shadows seem to linger but, across the way, is a raised dais also of thick white carpeting. On display is a big black box, shiny in the artificial light.

Outside, on the porch behind me, are pumpkins and corn stalks, festive and generic, celebrating harvest, celebrating a world deprived of texture, of warmth or fear or death, which is ironic in a place such as this. Humans need texture, need the experience of running their fingers over the rough things of life, to feel, to cry, sometimes simply to scream in abject loss. There is no room for such an outburst in a place like this. Contemporary lines and blocks and cubes remind us of our place in time and space and that place is to stay cool and hushed within permanent conformity. A young family walks in, Mom, Dad, holding their young boy’s hands. He will be too young to remember this moment, too young for any gravitas.

I blink. The early afternoon sun is bright, the sky appropriately blue, and the truck’s air conditioning is blasting. My moment in another time and place has ended, and the world is now framed by overpass and five traffic lanes and a Waffle House. No rustling corn, no red sunset, no cool, white room. Only a schedule to keep, only a tank of gas to buy on another everyday Monday. I shake myself and stare ahead through the dirty windshield. No matter how I cut it, I will remember this moment, this moment of mortality and macabre in the midst of sterile, everyday stay-in-your-lane convention. 

Every beginning has an end. But every end has a beginning, a strange fact overlooked in our florescent-washed, artificially flavored world of flat lines and flat lands and our desperate compulsion to leave the past forever behind. And when I think back now, I will remember my feet bare and free in the thick white carpet, toes sinking in the soft, standing alone on a cold, plush dais where I look down at the man in the shiny black box, a man whose face is my own, and finally begin to find acceptance of my own mortality, my own uneven past, my own limitations, and find a moment to appreciate my face in a way I could never do in life, a face aged a bit to be honest, but still not bad to look at, quiet finally and eyes closed forever and but also again. They say you shiver once when someone crosses your grave, but I do not shiver and instead only sigh in relief for having made it so far against the odds. No one tells you a lifetime passes so quickly.