Here Comes the Sun....

I was driving down Austin Highway a little before seven this morning.  It’s a curvy road, and I see it every day at different hours. I pass the white former-Shell station at the intersection of Austin Highway and Broadway,  the original red neon pegasus on top. It's now a shop. A couple of days ago, I was driving past it with Evan, who’s doing amazing things with my yard, and we were both recalling the Sixties when the Shell Station was a  hopping place.  Wedged in near it were El Tipico, the Mexican restaurant where you could get a big plate for $1.25, and the Bean Pot, a popular barbecue place, both now gone.

Then I pass the Bun N Barrel, a burger joint that’s been there for decades.  Neon signs and classic cars, hamburgers, Fifties music—just the kind of place Mike loves.  Further down there used to be a string of old hotels from the Forties and lots of run-down buildings, but now that stretch is all cleaned up and modernized with Target and gyms and car washes, homogenized just like every major shopping road anywhere.

Before seven, the red sun was just the right size to fill in the  circle of a round empty frame where something neon used to be.   In the haze, I could have taken a great timed-just-right photograph, centering the soft sun in the circle--but alas, I had forgotten to take my iPhone.  I did a quick U-Turn, ran home to get the camera, but in those few minutes, the sun had risen and turned gold.  I'll just store that moment in my memory bank and here, not my digital image savers as I'd have liked to do.

I’ve lived in this beautiful city so long that there are countless emotional pockets in it for me, some good, some not so much.  One place reminds me of a drive in a convertible, top down, with a former boyfriend named Sonny, another jolts me all the way back to the late Sixties when I was new to the city at 18,  another reminds me of the night in the late Nineties when I left that marriage and sat with two friends for hours crying and afraid.  It’s like that all over town—places are saturated with memories and driving can trigger a flood of them.

My favorite memories of Austin Highway involve Mike.  He loves Shipley Donuts and burgers and barbecue on Austin Highway.  My scale reflects the recent partaking of these pleasures with him.

My life of late has been rather strange, sometimes sad, sometimes scary, but today I'm watching Evan and Josh transforming my yard in beautiful ways, and it's good.  The sun comes up again every day, no matter what's going on in our houses and bodies.  Like all things, if you want to reach out and capture the sun, you have to do it in the moment.  It doesn't hang out and wait for another right moment.