There was something else on my mind, but it slipped off. Old brains get slippery, like rocks in a slow-moving stream. Footing becomes perilous, and I end up falling in more and more frequently. For example, I discovered this evening that the lat time I bought butter I accidentally picked up the unsalted kind. How inattentive of me. It's another reminder that soon I should probably not be allowed to wander around loose, but since there's nobody around here to forbid me that's surely what I will end up doing.
But at least when I faceplant there will be plenty of padding around my brain, since I do a lot of woolgathering these days. Moments ago when I went out to sniff the night air I heard a motorcycle passing along a nearby street, and the thought that popped into my head was of the hamburgers at Henry's Drive-in in Alhambra. The place closed going on fifty years ago, and it had been several years since I'd been there at that time. It was at one end o the local cruising strip, but not being a driver I never availed myself of the car service. I always ate in the coffee shop, which was a big round room with a low ceiling and indirect lighting, dating from the later 1930s, the period of transition from Art Deco to Streamline Modern. A fairly classy joint in its time, but by then in slow decline for some years.
Many pages of the paper journals that burned with my house were written there, as I drank coffee at the curved counter along the edge of which I once saw a small, brown roach scurry toward the kitchen. The sight of the roach didn't dissuade me from eating Henry's tasty hamburgers, though, or the hot apple pie a la mode with brandy sauce. It was Los Angeles, after all, and las cucarachas were simply part of the scenery, just like their smaller cousins the termites. These days I have the attention span of a roach, and my brain feels as though it is infested with termites who have been hollowing it out for years. I wish I could remember what I wrote in those journals all those decades ago, but the memories have turned to dust as surely as the journals themselves have been reduced to ash.
And on that happy note....