Impermanence, and what endures

The tavern in the middle of our town looked like one of those windowless bars I rode by when I was a kid in the back of the station wagon on trips when for apparently moral reasons we couldn’t use the neon sign’s “Q” in “Liquor” for the alphabet game. Covered windows or no windows at all, I envisioned those bars dark, dirty and mysteriously bad inside, with men hunched under the roof around brown bottles of beer, like trolls under a bridge around unspeakable loot.

Don and I have lived a few years on a country road two miles from a town where a tavern has presided over its comings and goings for decades. Every weekday I drive through the village's eclectic row of houses and the four corners of downtown on my way to and from work. There is an alternate route I could take, but the town reassures me, with its thousand people who know each other and on summer evenings buy ice cream cones at the general store across from the tavern, leaning on posts while they lick Rocky Road, or lounging on the store steps smoking cigarettes. I fill up my gas tank on the third corner at the BP, deciding to support a business in town even as I support a company that administered a disaster. Maybe my gas money will help someone get compensation for the oil spill too. I can hope.

The tavern across from the general store is in a building that is 150 years old. That's when the Civil War began. We got to know the tavern, where neighbors and friends ate pizza and drank beer, Harley bikers stopped for breakfast on their smooth Sunday rides across the state, and cyclists by the dozen stopped for lunch and a rest. On Memorial Day the end of May, the owner sold barbecued ribs and chicken from his trailer in the parking lot during the parade. Once a month or so we got a booth in the smoky old joint and ate bar burgers or all you can eat Friday fish fries when we didn’t feel like cooking.

The tavern burned Wednesday in the middle of the night, no one hurt thankfully. Workers pulled down the hollow brick walls the next day when the fire had been put out by firefighters from all over. When I drove home Thursday, sort of forgetting that the tavern was gone, I turned the corner onto Jackson Street between the square of charred piles of bricks of the tavern and the general store, and suddenly I had to stop. I was in the midst of a crowd of hundreds of residents (half the town) who were standing in a vigil in the middle of the street gathered around the tavern’s owner standing by his pickup, letting him know they love him and want him to rebuild. Hands were held high with cell phones snapping pictures as friends stepped forward to hug him one by one. There I was, driving my little Aveo through the crowd (it was impossible to go back the way I’d come) dividing it like Moses parting the Red Sea, with the sea of people closing in together behind me. I may not know anybody in this town (I'm fine with that, we have good friends and big families), but I felt bolstered by their group hug that surrounded me like a living piece of cloth being unzipped and rezipped by me in my car and all that love.