A Sentence About a Not so Lazy Day of Summer

I woke up and said today is gonna be a fun day, and Dash said why and I said, I don’t know I just feel like it is, and it was and maybe that had something to do with it, saying that, or it could have been the actual records-stacked-side-by-side jukebox in the Peninsula Fountain and Grill in Palo Alto, that actually works, green and red buttons lit up I can’t believe it works, yes if you hit the letter and the number buttons and hold them down at exactly the same time- and hearing “Shout!” a little bit louder now, “Shout!” as we ate our trio of pies Chocolate Pecan, Blueberry and Chocolate Cream, this after seeing Maltese Falcon at the Stanford Theatre, a 194o’s  little town movie palace complete with chandeliers and Wurlitzer organ, but we were hungry as hell so we didn’t stay around for, I know I  know, yes we skipped out on Casablanca which  was part 2 of the double bill,  we were hungry (short ribs with mash, turkey Pot pie, even Dash who’s the King of Blase says, “this is my favorite restaurant ever!” but as we paid the check the kids said “why not go back and see the end of it?” and we did, though it’d been a long day, and earlier laying flat on the ground outside Stanford Practice Football field where in a knothole in the fence we watched a coach dwarved against a defensive line of giants putting them through  some stamp on the ground flip over then stamp on the ground and flip back over again drill, yelling, “it’s not so fuckin hard is it? You wanna get the hell outta there on third down right?” and we all felt right at home then,  back on our couch plowing through all five seasons of Friday Night Lights, and then we’d tossed the pigskin around ourselves in the sun on the grass and buzzed over to the theatre for Maltese Falcon which isn’t one tenth what Casablanca is, sorry Dashiell Hammet, but now we’re in the balcony, about as high as that chandelier watching Casblanca and i’m filling the kids in where I can, whispering (“see, I told you we’d probably come in right at the flashback to their week in Paris” and “those are the Nazis who are kind of in control but the french are sort of too”) and we watched until the end and Faye laughed when Rick said don’t forget  i’ve got the gun pointed at your heart and Louis responds, “that is my least vulnerable part” and the fog rolls in so fast as that movie steams to it’s conclusion and the propellers start spinning, I notice the kids aren’t fidgeting and  when Louis says, “captain Strasser’s been shot…round up the usual suspects” I could tell they understood that some sticky situations  can work out alright with friendship thrown into it and when the two walk off into the fog and, “this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” and the applause rises from the crowd and in the car on the way home you hear them tell their mom on the phone, “it was such a cool movie” and I know that the first time they saw it was there, with me-  and maybe three people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this life but this is us three and it’s our damn beans, and Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris, but we’ll  always have this night, walking out as the mighty Wurlitzer plays it again Sam and fades away.

jw