Dis

There is something to be said for Tuesday cheap pizza day slices. The discount ritual had been going on forever.  On one side of the two-sided strip mall was a hot dog cum breakfast eatery.  It was the kind of place where you could two eggs sunny side up, with hash browns, brown toast and coffee for a flat $6.99.  For years Tuesday’s midday had been the joint’s cheap dog day.  If you bought anything else, say an order of fries ala carte, you could buy a dog covered with meaty chili sauce and onions for a dollar fifty.  Two dogs, fries and a glass of water put you under six bucks.

The “deli” on the other side of the building had responded for decades with Tuesday cheap pizza day.  On Tuesdays a slice of cheese or ham pizza, a bag of chips and a pop would run about $5.25 all tax included. The differences between the two were this.  The pizza “deli” was fast, the folks there had a system. The “Coney Island Dog” well it had flavor.  The Coney dogs were tasty. The chili seemed to be cooked on premise.  The fries were closer to crisp than most.  But even a takeout order would take you twenty minutes. Time as we all know is a precious commodity.

To get to food Josh would walk from his office over to one of the two restaurants.   His path was through a ragged city park, across a parking lot and then into the deli or to the Coney Island.  To and fro without stopping was about an 18-minute round trip.  His health tracking watch loved the walk, but he never would tell it about the food he would purchase. About half of the trek was in the unkempt park and other half across black top parking.

When it was warm, say 85 degrees, Josh would loosen his tie.  The tie together with a pale blue button-down shirt were his uniform. The path he by habit followed would lead him under a semi-circle of trees. About twenty-foot-tall each, these softwoods ringed the outfield of the community baseball field.  As he passed under them the trees would be kicking out oxygen at a high level. Their fresh air and shade would make this first half of the walk tolerable.

The trek across the parking lot was everything the walk through the park was not.  Josh would become a character in live action version of the video game Frogger. Josh though of playing Frogger back in the bars in the eighties every time he crossed this parking lot. Also, the black unshaded asphalt surface sucked up the sun’s heat.  This increased the overall temperature he experienced by 10- or 15-degrees Fahrenheit.  Dodging cars and abandoned shopping carts he would eventually find his way to “fast” food.

To make sure he was opting for the right food, Josh mentally rifled through the work he had to do this afternoon.  No real breaks on the docket.  While he was allotted an hour for lunch, he would be far better off if he just used 35 minutes or so.  The pizza place won out in this equation. 

A little sweaty from the outbound walk Josh in a polite tone asked, “Ham, one slice please, some regular chips and a small root beer”. Before he finished his order the folks behind the counter were halfway into bagging it to go.  Yeah, Josh had been here a time or three before.  The root beer might seem an odd choice, but it was the only non caffeinated item on the drink menu.  Josh carefully avoided caffeine.

Time wise he was good. He flew across the parking lot pop in one hand a bag with chips and pizza carefully balanced in the other.  Josh was feeling good as he headed back through the park.  Josh scanned his surroundings.  He figured that almost any city park in this part of the country looked like this one, at least to some extent.  The grass which used to be moved weekly now waived, in the largest part of the park, like grasses had waived on the prairie when the great herds of buffalo migrated.  The part of the park that was mowed, was mowed at best every other week.  Shredded napkins and shards of paper pop cups were thrown about from where the city employees had run them over in a more whole state with those big ass industrial mowers.  The city would, if it could, sell this park.  The auto plants that had paid the lion’s share of the taxes and wages in this town had long ago moved to more rural settings. The city was wounded by a million little cuts like this.

For the size of the park there was a major incongruity.  The semi circle stand of trees by the baseball field were airy, attractive and cooling.  The park overall despite its ragged state, was an inviting place.  But for all these positives of this old park, and all the foot traffic (from the health-conscious walkers), there was only one picnic table.

There in an open area not near any shade, at the edge of the tall grass, sat a table that was designed to be accessible.  The five planks of the table surface extended on one end two and a half feet beyond where the benches ended.  This, of course, was to allow a differentially abled person to sit and join with others who were eating their midday meal or some other snack.  Rightly, this table was designed to offer as many people as possible a place to enjoy a meal. But it was the only table.

As he headed back toward his office and with the heat amplifying black top behind him, Josh had decided he would sit at the table.  He never ate outside.  Most of his meals were taken at his desk.  Most of his meals came from white boxes that said Lean Cuisine.  Most of the time he would drink water.

Approaching the table, Josh saw another person sitting there.  She had a name tag on. Josh could tell by the colors she worked for the health care company in the building next to his.  He knew this because being a health care company, it encouraged its staff to walk every day.  Whenever he left his building between his cases, he would see groups of women with this same name tags walking up and down all the sidewalks near his office. 

Josh in his mind decided to inwardly call that solitary woman Joan.  It might be her name. Who knows but to Josh she was a Joan. He could have read her name tag but that wasn’t going to happen.  Joan as she sat at her desk in the cube farm that was her office, had been thinking that it today it would be nice not to walk during her lunch hour.  It was just too warm.  Joan didn’t want to stay inside either.  Joan would have sat under the trees but the trade off for being cool would be dirtying her clothing in some manner. She had a corporate dress code to live by.

Joan had brought a sandwich, homemade chicken salad with cherries and walnuts.  She had brought a peach.  She had brought a bottle of water.  ‘Nope’, thought Joan, ‘No hot sweaty march for me.  I am just going to eat my sandwich at the edge of the tall grass at that picnic table’.

Joan sat alone and was well into her sandwich when Josh approached.  She hadn’t really perceived his motion; her eyes were fixed downward on her iPad.  She was reading a book on how to retire early at some exotic locale and live on the cheap.  Time in her life was slipping away, and she wanted this all to count for something.  She wanted leisure and joyful rest when her working days were done.  She was one of the few in her office her maxed out her 401K. Joan was a planner.

Josh was a little nervous as he approached the picnic table.  He wanted to eat outside but he didn’t want to make the woman sitting at the table uncomfortable.  The man decided he would simply ask if she would mind if he sat at the other end of the table.  If the answer was yes, she minded, he would eat on the back steps of his office.  If the answer no he would sit down at the accessible end.  He approached the table, he coughed, and then Josh said in a moderate and modulated tone, “Would you mind if I grabbed a seat and he used the hand carrying the pop to point to the opposite side and the other end of the table from where Joan was.

Startled Joan looked at the man.  He had said something, but she had been so engrossed in her reading she didn’t hear it.  But he was pointing down the table and away from her.  He wanted to sit.  He was clean and he had a loose tie.  His hair was wild but all in all he seemed normal.  “Sure, go ahead,” she said.

Josh placed his pop on the table. The sweat from the warm air hitting the cool skin of the wax paper cup began to form a dark circle on the unstained tabletop as soon as he set it down.  Once, this table has been brown and stained with preservative.  Now it was gray and weathered like driftwood you would find on the stony beaches of the Pacific Northwest.  Josh set the paper bag with the pizza and chips down next to the pop and he swung his legs over the bench.  He was determined not to bother the reading woman.  He figured he would wolf down the slice, follow that with the chips and then get up and head off.

For the majority of Josh’s walk the air had been still. Not a breath of air stirred.  No sooner he sat down but the paper bag, now empty of the chips and pizza, tried to fly away.  Deftly he grabbed it and crumpled it and placed it just far enough under one of his legs on the bench so it would not be blown into the park. The gust of air was a surprise.

As they sat the table, Josh focused on eating and Joan intent on her reading, the wind kept blowing in fits and spurts.  As they sat there, Josh began to hear a hollow mournful sound.  Listening closer it wan’t one sound but rather a couple of sounds; one was low and really carried a bass note.  A second tone he heard was higher up the scale something like the trill of a very oversized panpipe.

Joan looked up trying to figure what was making that racket.  She looked around but could see nothing.  She glanced down the table and saw the man at the end was looking about.   Joan applying her normal rational logic decided the sound was not dangerous, so she returned to her readings.

Josh thought to himself as he looked around, ‘I have heard this sound before.’  He glanced around the parking lot that abutted the park and he saw it.  As people were wont to do from time to time someone had ditched an empty semi-trailer in the abutting parking lot to await a pickup from a rig headed either to or fro.  This was still a town of machine shops and skilled labor.  Josh looked at the lines of the truck and he saw some hollow metal work that ran under the frame of the trailer.  He guessed that the wind was catching the trailer just right and was turning it into a musical instrument. 

He stopped to listen, what was his memory of?  ‘Ah’, he thought, ‘This is the sound of ECM.’  Back when Josh had been at college, he had bought lots and lots of LPs.  Many of them were what was derisively called Euro jazz by his music inclined buddies.  One of the artists Josh really liked was wont to put large pieces of metal on a beach to get sounds like the ones the truck was generating. The artist would then play a saxophone along with those mournful or graceful tones the wind would generate.  Josh remembered that music could be eerie, but he also remembered could be so very calming.  Who was it, Terrie Rypdahl or Jan Gabarek? 

Joan was growing more annoyed by the damn moaning wind.  She clicked off her iPad, slapped the cover across its face and got up. She was clutching the iPad under her arm and holding her lunch bag in her other hand.  As she set off for the office the man wished her a good afternoon and offered her thanks for her letting him sit down.  “No worries”, she responded. Quickly the man and the table were gone. Quickly Joan was entering her office.

Josh just sat there for a bit listening to the changing tones of the sound coming from the trailer.  He lingered a little long but then he headed back to his office.  ‘Dis’, he thought.  ‘Dis was the name of the album’.  He would be searching for that lost memory tonight when he got home.  His senses had been stirred.

Joan on the other hand would forget the noise entirely within a matter of minutes.