Lunch Room

Not withstanding the fact that not in the too distant past this roadside lunch room and, most likely gas station, thrived along a well trafficked highway, the income from which supported a number of people and their families, it is no more. For reasons that are unimportant today although once, perhaps, were at the forefront of many minds, this business closed its doors never to reopen again. One can just imagine the politics discussed over cups of coffee, the decisions made about what to plant, how to bale hay, funeral plans and so on, things that impacted the local residents even more than national headlines (unless the nation was at war in which case those discussions may have focused on how so-and-so is doing in Germany or Japan or Korea or Viet Nam, or Lebanon, or Somalia, or Iraq or consoling parents whose children perished in some foreign battlefield.) For those still alive, memories were formed within the walls of this abandoned lunch room; good times or bad it doesn’t matter. At one time in the not so distant past those who depended on this lunch room for a living couldn’t imagine it would close, left to rot and crumble along the highway for all who pass by to see. But here it is, paint pealing, timbers rotting for all to see along the highway that was once well traveled.

Because we only experience the NOW, the moment of existential time that imprints memory traces to make life appear as a continuity of past, present and future, we tend to paint the future in terms of some kind of progress. In fact, the line between progress and the future is skewed heavily to the experience of the NOW. It is nearly impossible to imagine a future much different that the present circumstances that impact everyday life. The random occurrences or decisions or events that have the effect of making the future different that we might expect or plan for may not be a part of the experience of those ultimately impacted. Businesses fail because someone far removed say in the highway department of the state bureaucracy decides to place a new by-pass around a town so no one except locals drive through the heart of the town’s business section. The decision maker may not have ever visited the town he or she dooms to economic failure. Separation requires no response so the lunch room fails to make a profit and dies.

This is not an indictment of the bureaucrat nor is it a sympathetic homely on the values of small town lunch rooms. It is simply a realization that what seems to us to be so all fired important and so deeply permanent isn’t! Nothing lasts forever, not even the rocks.