Frank’s Coffee Shop

JEREMY ROBERTS

1.Frank’s coffee shop is an original ’50s diner with one cook, one waitress.

I order burger & coleslaw. The waitress smiles, notes it down.

The coffee will be refilled for nothing. The cook gets busy.

The waitress fills the cook’s eyes like a plate of hot fries, as she clutches her cell-phone, staring out the window.

She is deep in the digital universe because this is where dreams now live.

She is waiting for something - in a uniform that is slightly too small.

I want her to be an old-fashioned girl, a 1950s girl –

who smokes Lucky Strikes.

Her favourite actress is Natalie Wood.

She digs Elvis, admires Rosa Parks.

Senator McCarthy sucks.

She’s not sure where she fits into ‘The American dream’.

After her shift, she’s picked up by a guy driving a ’57 Chevy. S

he jumps in beside him, he burns rubber …

Sixty years later, I finish eating, pay, leave a tip & walk back outside.

2. Not much is known about how thoughts arrive, but the process involves ‘neurons’ & ‘synapses.’ For instance, decades may wobble around in the brain, before forming a soft pillow of nostalgia. Today, electronic portals connect us to Cyberspace – where games of survival & yearning also exist. This type of ‘being in the moment’ is regarded as de rigueur, a virtual reality of living nerves.