Daybreak Diner

DAYBREAK DINER

I pulled up in the yard at Aunt Mary’s Hometown Eats, early; black ravens and white gulls squabbled around the dumpster beside the kitchen door. My brother was already there in the late September predawn, waiting out front beside his eco-lovers’ Tesla. Just off the morning ferry from the city, he didn’t belong. Locals like me wore boot-cut blue jeans and ball caps; Jerry was in black skinny jeans and a fedora. We both wore plaid flannel shirts, open and untucked, over T-shirts, but his T was black.

We’ve both gone grey, years back: my hair’s long and my chin’s shaved, while he wears both hair and beard clipped to about a quarter inch all over. Haven’t been face to face with him since the last family funeral, but here, it didn’t take much guessing to pick him out.

I slid down from my little, jacked-up 4x4 Colorado and crossed the gravel yard to meet him. We shook hands and smiled politely, “Howdy, Stranger.”

“You made it out of the bush, I see.”

“And you made it to the boat in time to get up here from Bigtown. Let’s go in and see what Mary’s cooking.”

“We’ve got a couple hours – my reservation to go back is for the next sailing.” All business, quick in and out, and the “brother” stuff had never been strong for us.

“Aunt Mary,” if there ever was one, had left her diner to others long ago. The cooks were competent Asians, the morning waitresses local girls, one (dyed) blonde, the other Indigenous, with a green streak in her black braid.

“Gonna rain today?” I asked the one who took us to a back booth.

“Likely as not!” she said cheerily. “It’s the Coast, eh? Now, you fellas just have a read of these menus, and we’ll be back in a bit for your orders. Coffee to start?”

“OJ for me,” Jerry said. “Fresh, if you’ve got it.” I nodded yes to the coffee. “Black, please.”

The menus were inkjet-printed sheets in worn plastic folders. “If I were a strict vegan, I’d maybe have water and crackers to choose from,” Jerry said before he’d looked past the Special Platters.

“Not so much, maybe, but keep going. The hippies left a legacy out here.”

We both ended up with waffles, but his were veggie, and soy cakes to my bacon. We both had coffees, now, and the wait-staff kept them topped up. I made the sign of the cross over my plate, and Jerry jibed, “Bacon, Eggs, and Holy Toast, A-men!” Religion was another of our many differences.

“How’s life at the U?” I asked. Jerry taught Sociology and played jazz guitar in his spare time.

“I keep my nose to the grindstone, trying to publish lest I perish and be replaced by a BIPOC or trans scholar.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Yes, one’s work should be rated on quality, but these days, politics tends to slip in.”

“May your peer-reviews be ever friendly,” I toasted him with my coffee. “So, why did you want to meet, after all these years?”

Jerry looked me straight in the eye. “I don’t want you being asked to speak at my funeral without an at least slightly updated acquaintance. I have a cancer diagnosis that gives me six months to six years.”

“Whoa! I don’t know what to – six months to six years! The upper end of that, there could be time to find a cure. . .”

“Hope springs eternal, and I’m still trying to keep my job as long as I can work, but it goes against my grain to be optimistic.”

Wow – Jerry never chopped his words fine, but it felt like a gaping hole had opened where the table was between us.

“You’re older, but I always thought I’d be sure to go first, ’cause I play with trucks and chainsaws and woodstoves,  motorbikes, all that stuff.”

“I sit at a computer, or stand onstage, or beside a presentation-screen! But I bicycle to work in city traffic – maybe the exhaust gave me the cancer. And I travel with Ginger’s NoNet to festivals all over – we’re due in N’Orlins over Christmas. So my lifestyle’s not totally risk-free.”

“Never said it was – but Ma used to think like that. She worried about me.”

“Me, too, I hope, but you probably did push boundaries more openly: Classic Rock probably has a wilder rep than jazz, even these days, although back in the Roaring Twenties, Dixieland was wild.”

“It was just rock, or even Southern Boogie and country, when I started back in high school. Psychedelic was over, we didn’t go punk or glam-art, just Zep, Skynyrd, the Allmans, that stuff. ‘Whiskey, women, and the open road!’”

“Us jazzers were all intellectual and experimental, but still a lot of heroes got lost to booze or heroin . . ."

"But Ma and Pa felt easier about the jazz, and you stayed clean and lived nearby, while I bought my little farm up here among the bears when I wasn’t on the road between bars.”

“I smoked some dope and drank the odd martini, but that was the times, and my ranting and roaring were quieter, I guess.”

“It’s an old routine but, ‘Mom always liked you best’!”

“No way! I stayed closer, so I saw Ma and Pa more, had to be executor when they died, but you were the one she always talked about. I went all urban and intellectual, but you lived more their way, the country way, and then after you ‘came to Jesus,’ you were No. 1 for sure.”

“Jesus dragged me out of a ditch when our cube van hit a moose, pulling an all-night run between gigs. Danny the driver and Pedro our bass-man didn’t make it. I was no different than they were, and it coulda been me in the morgue, instead of the hospital, but I got another chance. I don’t make as much money playing church halls as we did rockin’ the bars, but I can be thankful, and I get to give something back!"

“So why didn’t Jesus save Danny or Pedro?” Jerry challenged.

“I always wondered about that, actually.” I couldn’t really argue, just respond. “Maybe Ma was praying for me at just the right time . . .”

“Wouldn’t that be God’s doing, too?”

“Some things we just don’t know – we trust and carry on.”

“I bet there’s a T-shirt like that!”

“Hope it sells! The message works. But let’s grab some more of our waffles before they’re stone cold!”

“Guess I can say ay-men to that,” Jerry said. “I’m surprised how good these vegetarian ones are!”

“The bush isn’t all ‘roughing it,’ and even a local diner has to give you more than reheated frozen plates,” I agreed. We munched, sipped and savoured for a time. Aunt Mary’s was getting busier, so commotion and cooking smells were around us.

“Hey, it’s Pastor Dick and the deacons!” I said, as a local minister and his lay leaders came in to take up a pair of reserved tables.

“Couldn’t he call himself Rick or Richard, these days?” Jerry said with a hint of a sneer. “’Dick and the Deacons’ sounds like a risqué vocal harmony group.”

“Dick is his last name! Mennonite family.” We chewed and swallowed a bit longer.

“It feels weird,” I said after emptying my coffee cup again. “I mean, here we are doing something brothers or friends do probably every day. We’re exercising our senses, filling our bellies, spending time together – all because of this news of yours!”

“Y’know, you’re right: it’s been decades since we knew each other, let alone sat down to eat and talk. And what breaks the silence? My cancer!”

“There’s a lotta that around, these days,” our server interjected, overhearing as she refilled my cup. “Up on the reserve, we blame the water.”

“And thus, the government,” Jerry said. “But did they force you to eat juice crystals and packaged mac’n’cheese?”

The Indigenous server with the green stripe looked Jerry in the eye. “They didn’t help maintain healthy stocks of deer and salmon, did they?”

“I don’t forage for my beans and rice, either,” he admitted. “Fair point.”

“Jerry,” I interrupted, now, as the server moved away. “What do you plan to do when you can’t work or play guitar?”

“Hospice? Palliative care? I don’t know – will it be the pain or the treatment schedule that makes me quit? Can’t really say.”

“If it’s not the treatments, you could come up here, breathe fresh air, eat some really fresh fish . . .”

“You wanna watch me die, like the old Johnny Cash song?”

“This is a long way from Folsom Prison! And maybe you won’t die. Out in nature, with love around you, and people praying for you . . .”

“Can’t you ask Jesus to heal me, even if I’m down in the city?”

“Can and will, but sometimes it helps to touch, maybe even use some olive oil!”

“You take this all the way out to anointing and laying on of hands?”

“It’s in the Bible, can’t do any harm. Jenny and I have been amazed sometimes. And maybe you could work some jazz magic over my country pickin’ if your hands don’t hurt too much!”

“Don’t think this thing will affect my hands. My Gretsch  6120 is a hollow body, too, not some heavy plank with pickups!”

“A 6120 is my main electric, too! You wouldn’t have yours with you?” 

“Course I do – little practice amp, I spent the ferry ride working out some stuff!”

In minutes, we had our guitars and amps plugged into outdoor electrical sockets. We tuned together, and Jerry started to fingerpick some freaky chord. I kicked in with a flatpick – “Country is jazz on the bridge pickup.”

I spotted an opening and segued into “Power in the Blood.” We must have jammed for over half an hour, country Gospel and jazz standards, and we were drawing a crowd who hooted and clapped for every solo.

“I can’t believe this!” Jerry said when we finally took a break. “All these years, I thought we had nothing in common – we just weren’t using the right language!”

“You’ve got work for now, but like I say, you’re welcome up here during term breaks, or when you can’t handle your professor gig . . .”

“I’m not quitting until I have to,” Jerry cautioned. “And I won’t let the guys down for the festival Down South if I can help it.”

“Accepted and understood. But whenever you have time, as long as you can make it up here, Jenny and I will make you as much of a home as we can. The kids are off doing their stuff, so we have the room. Ve can mek boo-tiful moo-sick together! And you never know what the Lord can do.”

“An hour ago, I would have snickered, but this session we just had tells me that things I would never imagine can actually happen.”

A ferry whistle hooted in the grey distance. “Better get in the lineup quick, unless you want to stay for the last boat, after supper!”

Jerry looked hesitant, then resolute. “No, I need to process this, and I’ve got marking to do, back at the U. Like I say, my return reservation is for this boat. But you’ve given me a glimpse of hope for things I would have thought impossible, and I will be back.” He quickly packed his axe and amp back in his car, and they whirred off to the line awaiting the approaching ferry, by now easing into its berth.