I come upon an old photograph of me, taken at least twenty two years ago, and there I am, the quiet American hero. there in my old Ike Jacket, Levis blue jeans that have seen comfortable wear, sitting on a stone wall up in a village in the Pyrenees. The picture, taken by my buddy, Phillippe, who drove too fast, who smoked many cigarettes, who liked the nightclubs, and who wore me out.  But there we are, in a little village, Lescun, tucked away above Oloron St. Marie, near Pau, and unbeknownst to me, near Lourdes, and also near some of the famous climbs of the Tour de France.  I wish we'd taken those roads too.  But there you go, that's life.

The old village had at one point been a leper colony, my friend told me later.  We bought some farmhouse ewe's milk cheese, and almost stayed the night at the rustic inn, with the bathroom a hole in the cement with two foot marks like cleats to stand upon.  I would have liked to follow the road up further, gone for a hike, but after a few hours there, after visiting the church and inspecting parts of the village, we went back down, past running streams, to Mourenx.


I was indeed a brave guy to work in a restaurant, as a bartender, and quite foolish, and it cost me all the things of a good life, I know now.  But you don't really know this so well when you're in the midst, trying to get by, with some fool dream of being a writer...

I had a great uncle who, as my grandfather tells the story, started crying when he worked in the family diner business, at the chores of washing dishes.  He ended up being an engineer of some sort in the Battle of The Bulge.  And on the GI Bill, he went back to school at got his law degree at Georgetown, after attending Boston University.  He ended up working in the justice department, had a great Washington DC life, worked with Robert Kennedy's anti-racketeering people.  Yeah.

He was the smart one.

The American hero is behind now.  Whatever shot he might have had to be a teacher, well, he blew that, that civilized thing where people get together and read and talk about what they have read.  He gave that away to sort of half-drunken half-adventures that were as much a waste of time as anything else.

And now his heart flutters sometimes, and when he has wine enough to ease him through the bleakness of his solitary evenings, now made worse by isolation.

And as a sort of final act, it is up to him to go tend to his aging mother, sometimes raging in the onset of her dementia memory loss, far away enough, isolated, an apartment full of clutter he must deal with.


Then I came to befriend the night.

The car is rented for noontime, more or less, downtown now.  I cook a burger on the iron pan, eat, nap, then get up and do the dishes.  Too much tree pollen on a windy day, riding the mountain bike out on the towpath for sanity, feeling funny in the head.

I do not want to go back to tending bar, but what else can I do, at this point.