I was sitting in a kitchen with Andy and who I thought would’ve been Kevin but it didn’t look like Kevin, and this guy was an attorney. We were talking about the fact that a printing company was soliciting him to move his business to them instead of doing it in house. I asked him if he made a lot of copies, and then I retracted the question and gave him the answer. “Of course you do”, I replied, extending my memory back and relating to him that when I was much younger, I worked in the copy room of a large law firm in L.A. He commented that the copy company was trying to persuade him by offering a getaway on a secluded island that was equipped with high powered telescopes that would give him ample opportunity to study the celestial sky without interruption. It sounded like a pretty cool deal and he was on the verge of accepting.
I sat at their kitchen table during this conversation with a portion of my attention on a picture of a young black woman with a round face and smiling eyes. The picture sat in a tooled tin frame of the ornate Mexican variety and my found my finger skimming the edge of the frame until all of my attention was absorbed into it. Suddenly, I found myself on a street running parallel to a river wash. The street was lined with large bull pines, and I was being towed on what seemed to be a skateboard. Who I was being towed by was a largish Mexican man in his early twenties. He was wearing dark, stylized jeans with embroidered pockets. Every so often he would crane his head back far enough to make sure I was still there. I commented to him that he reminded me of George, whom he probably didn’t know.
We pulled into a driveway on the left and into a large parking lot. He continued forward until we came up to the curb in front of a restaurant that glistened white and bright in the noon time sun. “They” ushered me into the restaurant to be seated with a group near a patio. I started talking to the waitress and the others I was there to join on how surprisingly empty the parking lot was and that, before the downturn of the economy, that parking lot would’ve been packed to the gils at this time of day. I also pointed out that “The Barn” was closed down, which was a huge restaurant that had been there forever. I asked if anyone remembered “Maya”, the breakfast place that had also closed to everyone’s surprise, since that had he best breakfasts in town. The blonde waitress seemed the most interested in what I was talking about, but everyone seemed to be going out of their way to take care of me and make sure I was happy.
