Breakfast with Dennis

I scorch my hands on the steering wheel,

Burn my bum on the worn out green vinyl of the front seat

of my 1969 half-ton Chevy pick-up….affectionately dubbed

Tom Joad… I Cruise through the morning miasma of suburban

Dallas on a sweltering Sunday in early August of

1979….on my way to breakfast with Dennis…

Any meeting with Dennis reminds me that I have been fasting…There he sits, a benign Celtic panther, in a booth next to the window giving us both a magnificent view of the parking lot…his ruddy complexion, sandy hair, penetrating blue eyes all contribute to his lively and engaging demeanor.  “Hey Al, I already ordered.  Hope you don’t mind.”  “ No problem. I am tracking on sausages, scrambled eggs, blueberry pancakes and some coffee.”

As our buxom waitress approaches, Dennis twinkles.

She says, “More coffee, Hon?” Dennis replies, “Fill er up please!”

As she heads back to the kitchen and through the swinging doors we follow her with our playful eyes.

With the menu established we launch into the trade winds and maelstroms of western civilization: politics, religion, philosophy, metaphysics and poetry all punctuated by our particular stories…

Like a master juggler or superb acrobat…. a virtuoso conductor:

Dennis wields his encyclopedic knowledge of the West.

At our Table at Denny’s Restaurant we hold court to Homer and Shakespeare, Chaucer and Dante.  We join in the wrath of Achilles before the walls of Troy. We are lashed to the mast with Odysseus as he listens to the Sirens implacable song.

We look over Jung’s shoulder as he swallows Freud’s doctrine.

We stop with Dante in the middle wood….long enough to catch a glimpse of Beatrice calling him and us on….

Dennis sings and hums…vibrates with “I and thou….”

When he slows down…. we both take a breath in the caesura of the moment ….I find Thomas Merton erupting ecstatically into our midst.  Now with us, 11 years after his passing, he continues to encourage us in our raids on the unspeakable…

Blueberry pancakes notwithstanding we turn our gazes toward Titanism  …Moby Dick and Ahab… Vengeance posing as the servant of justice …the age old nightmare of military power and Empire….The phantasy of perfection and purity forever luring the innocent into the armies of the night…

At the end of our breakfast we come down from the mountain tops….down from the high heavens…..back here into the three dimensional world of space –time….back into the present…

Where all of these ancestors mythical and real, call out to us….

“Remember, Rise up, Take heart….it is you!

You are the one.”