CHINESE LADY SELLING ROSES

52. CHINESE LADY SELLING ROSES:

Be a writer be - 'every moment of your life you're writing even in your dreams you're writing when you walk the halls you meet various people and you write furiously in your head you see someone you like and you say hi in a warm melting way a hi that conjures up the splash of oars soaring violins eyes shining in the moonlight and there are so many ways of saying hi - hiss it trill it bark it sing it bellow it laugh it cough it - a simple stroll anywhere calls for paragraphs and sentences in your head' - probably a bit too much happy drivel for me but there it is nonetheless. - and the way I see it is if somebody wants to write they write they suture reality like a bad wound they spout effusive melodies to mostly the lame who cannot hear anyway and if they do are tone-deaf and disasterously stupid but all of that itself means nothing much (hospital doors corridors of stealth facades of banks and corporate hollows the needy outstretched hand of the door-to-door beggar and the Chinese lady selling roses) EVERYTHING in and of itself bears a witness to the flood of whatever it is that comes back to us and forces our achievement in spite of our efforts to allay all fears and stop productive moments from being - just look at the taverns and bars where elbow after elbow the drunks and the drinkers sidle up to empty places seeking bottled dreams and manifest energies of envy or doubt to be spoken in slurred speech from one old mouth to the next - piled on effusive young and piled on the dainty old both of whom stare straight ahead and look sad enough to cry and just today in Kearney New Jersey I'm in some truck-stop tiny little beat-to-shit diner somewhere along truck-route US Highway 1 and I'm sitting there and watching the local populace do their thing - the tired-looking and wasted waitress some Hispanic babe about 25 years old bedraggled dry-skin smoker's face big hoop earring tight-fitting jeans cigarette-smoke wreathing her head jabbering away on a cell phone to someone about something way too long and way too loud for my taste but no matter and the three or four Spanish and Mexican workers scurrying around the cook the washers the cleaners - all doing some little tidy work of their own but what most surprises me are the truck drivers themselves sitting around finishing up their lunches or meals and they get up one at a time or in two's and three's and some of them know each other enough to talk by name and their rigs are outside waiting and - WITHOUT fail - they each leave the diner with their purchase of beer in this case all Budweiser - one guy with a bottle another with two or three bottles and I swear two guys with six-packs of bottles in brown paper bags and into their trucks they go and ZIP off they are to America's great highways - across NJ across NYState to Albany or across Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh and beyond the nearby NJ Turnpike calls them and they go - beers in hand - and that I say surprised me - the beer-filled journeys and the lonely highway jaunts to somewhere but it's probably always been that way and even in this oh-so-correct day and age what truck-drivers really care about that and this wizened guy next to me says to the cook who's sitting nearby staring out the window (this guys has three empties in front of him and is working on his fourth) says "hey! c'mere! I'll talk to you if your lonely!" and the cook slides over and sits next to him and they start chatting and the drinking guy I hear says "you got your Chef apron on y'know - that means you're a Chef!" and the cook he just smiles and says "yes and I put it on myself" and they start laughing and then the cook says "I just now put it on because before I wasn't a Chef I was the diswasher - but now I'm a Chef again!" and they start laughing and the drinking guy reaches for his cigarettes but says they're missing he can't find them he thought they were right there and then he finds them in his top shirt pocket and they laugh again and the guy says "oh now look at this - you got everybody thinking I'm some kind of strange one but all I was doing was trying to find my smokes" and they chuckle again and before long nobody's listening anymore let alone me and the people coming and going pass in and out and the whole place is like some little transitory way-station on some truck-driving version of the passage to Paradise or something like it - and the I pay the girl my eight dollars and forty-five cents and leave her a two dollar tip for some reason and walk out to the cold NJ highway air.