Parkway

            I ordered an alligator sausage poboy.  Not my normal choice, but one I pick when I can.  French bread is solid.  A crunch followed by a sink.  Dressed just right.  Cooked just right.  Parkway Bakery is everything people say it is.

            Saints/Bears Sunday.  Saints win.  I sit with an old roommate.  We talk.  I didn’t get the lead in the opera.  I should have.  I’m good enough.  I’m a senior.  Why am I doing this?  Why am I doing this when a local theatre company is doing Spring Awakening?  A musical I loved so much it threw me into a long depression.  The kind where your parents have given up on asking you how you are and go straight to your friends.  Why am I doing a second rate Offenbach operetta when I can be doing a first rate award wining musical?  I don’t know.  John Paul didn’t know either.  But we talked about it.  I felt better after eating with such good company, though it is only a matter of time before I am alone and have only myself to criticize.

            It’s a hot day, but we sit outside anyway.  Parkway has pulled out all the tables for all the Saints fans that left the game hungry.  It was cooler inside, but it was too loud.  Sometimes high volume makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t.  We wanted to talk and joke and eat the way we usually do on our “dates.”  Crystal hot sauce bottles can be found at every table.  The roast beef is cooking.  I didn’t get the part I wanted, but Parkway is still working.  Things can’t be all bad.

            We decide to get dessert.  I jokingly advise John to just share my banana pudding instead of also getting bread pudding.  I was wrong.  Both were delicious.  While we were waiting for his bread pudding I saw two things happen.  John wanted to take a picture of the kitchen because it was so beautiful.  So he gets out his iPhone.  The girl passing poboys from the kitchen to the customers smiled.  Her smile was embarrassed but encouraging.  She knew she wasn’t ready for the photo and did not usually let herself get caught off guard like this.  She also felt famous.  Strangers don’t usually take pictures of me, she might think.  Shortly after, her partner at the window reached over and fitted her head with a hairnet she had forgotten to apply herself.  A move of love performed by another observed by another in another poboy shop.

Ode to the Milkshake

            It was a typical Sunday, and, when raised by two well-meaning, intelligent Catholics, a typical Sunday means mass.  Mass has always been a struggle for me.  My mother would suggest opening my heart, a task she has a natural talent for that I do not.  When that didn’t work she suggested that we go out to eat after mass.  That did work.

It is important to know that I lived in chain land.  I am from Atlanta.  Suburban Atlanta.  Atlanta is very big and it has many parts.  Some of them are really cool.  Some of them really suck.  I lived in one that really sucked.

            So we drove away from church, passing your typical fast food restaurants as well as a less typical fast food place called Guthrie’s, which remains the worst "restaurant" name I have ever heard.  We continue past Guthrie’s and the fast food chains and dive into the realm of casual dining chains.  We pass the Chili’s, Applebee’s, and, an Atlanta favorite, Taco Mac.  Places you can safely assume whatever you get will be edible, but not exceptional.  Somewhere within this mess lies the old married couple of the casual dining, Max and Erma’s.  Maybe you’ve seen one, but chances are the one you’ve seen has closed down since they declared bankruptcy two years ago.  It is here that I found the best milkshake I have ever tasted.

            I wish I had found this shake somewhere in New Orleans.  Like at Creole Creamery.  I would tell people that the ice cream at Creole Creamery is so unique and of such high quality that their shakes had no choice but to be the best.  Or the classic freeze at Camellia Grill.  It tastes home made, and, when paired with a diner style burger, you’ll find yourself in sugar-grease heaven.  These shakes are great, but they are not the best.  I have given that honor to the good people at Max and Erma's.

            So my mother and I sat down.  We looked at the menu.  I decided on a burger, my mother stuck to a cup of soup.  I noticed the milkshake and, just before our waitress came back to take our order, I asked my mother if I can get a milkshake too.  She showed her agreement by blessing me with a smile only a son could recognize. 

Describing the milkshake will do no good.  It is too unique and too separate from all others I have tasted.  All I can offer is advice.  Should you find yourself on a road trip to the northeast, and you need a little break from the road.  Skip the one of a kind hole-in-the-wall and head to the nearest strip mall.  If you're lucky you'll find a Max and Erma's that survived the recession.  It will look chainy, it will look average, and you won't want to go in.  Open your heart.  You’d be surprised what you’ll find.

Greyhound #1

            There are moments when things go dark.  My friend Nolan and I had just spent a week in New York.  It was the summer of 2007 and we are on the verge of being high school seniors.  We desired freedom.  This trip was taken without chaperone.  Just two 17 year olds looking for cheap Broadway musical tickets. 

We hoped for fun, and fun we had.  The cheapest way to travel was by greyhound.  A plane would have been ideal, but that money would be better spent on pizza or cheesecake, or anything “New York.”  So we took the bus. 

The trip up was easy.  There may have been moments of worry or annoyance, but those were so overshadowed by our excitement for the big city that they melted into the ever-present hum of ground transportation.  We rode that excitement all the way through our days in New York, and on the way back…we started to crash.  We were doing more reading than talking, and we both felt that yearning for the familiar.  This was the wrong time to get stuck in the Richmond, Virginia greyhound station for five hours.  And these were not any five hours this was from 5:00am to 10:00am.  Had it been 10:00am to 3:00pm, things may have felt a little better.  (Apparently those trusty greyhound authorities had forgotten to book a bus driver.  Must have been a case of the Mondays.)

            The key thing to remember is that bus terminals don’t get paid like airports.  If airports were a college graduate, bus terminals would be the failing younger brother with sociopathic tendencies.  Nothing was working for us.  The food was slop, every arcade game was broken, and, worst of all, the televisions were reporting the same five news stories on repeat.  Never anything new.  Just the same stories reported in the same way by the same people for five hours.  The perfect place to snap.

            We eventually made it onto a bus, and back to Atlanta in one piece.  We both graduated high school without scars, but we weren’t in college long before Nolan got into drugs.  He dropped out of college and worked his way through a number of rehab programs before he really desired to be clean.  I have only seen Nolan twice in the past two years, and sometimes it feels like our meeting this past summer was our last.  Things start to feel as dark as they did in that greyhound station.  But it is precisely that experience that brings the light back in.  I know that if I am ever asked what the worst place in the world is, I’m not the only one who would answer: Richmond, Virginia.

Why I Write

            Writing has not been a part of my life since I was 12.  Aside from your standard class papers, I haven’t really written since my 7^th grade pièce de résistance about a man’s last day in prison.  My high school English classes put a focus on analyzing rather than creating.  A skill worth having, but not a skill I desired.  While I entered high school with dreams of writing it didn’t take long for those dreams to turn to performing arts.  My parents encouraged me to try out for the junior high musical Fiddler on the Roof.  I got in and tried out for every play and musical I could until I graduated.  In class I was pursing every music class that would accept me.  I sang in every major choral ensemble and took music theory and composition classes.  These are the skills that brought me to Loyola.  Until a week ago I was a vocal performance major preparing for a life of opera.  Unfortunately it took three years for me to realize that opera is not something I want to chase when my dreams are most reachable.

            So where does that leave me.  Have the past three years of music study been a waste?  I tell myself it hasn’t, but it is hard to not feel that way.  I am now a music with elective studies major, with an English writing minor.  Is there much of a method to my major change?  Somewhat.  I started writing a film script and a play over the summer on a bit of a whim…and it felt pretty good.  It felt better than music had in a long time.  So why do I write?  Because I’m tired of music.