Beach Street

He had met the poet for breakfast at Beach Street. Beach Street was a classic American trucker’s cafe on the street of the same name. It was a couple of miles east of Sunset Beach, among produce packing sheds and industrial buildings and warehouses in Watsonville, and it was the standard alternate rendezvous for days when the weather didn’t permit them to walk on the beach. Today had been one of those days, with the storm driven waves thundering over the beach to crash into the bulkheads, cliffs, and dunes nearly a hundred yards inland from the usual high water mark. The TV weather man had warned of driving wind and rain and the treacherous forty foot surf on the late news the night before, and both of the friends knew that meant bacon, hashbrowns and eggs with coffee would replace their usual Tuesday morning walk.

Regardless of where they met, they seemed to sharpen and stimulate and challenge each other. They had known each other since the end of high school. His first impression of the poet came when his freshman English class took a field trip. The class walked out to a bench by a lamp post across the campus where the poet and another senior from the drama club were waiting for Godot.

They did not meet that day, or even that year. The poet graduated, and was seen around town from time to time. Intensity was the poet’s most publicly discernible trait. He remembered seeing the poet at his senior art show three years later. The poet wore long flowing robes reminiscent of a monk. He came and went in silence, and still they had not met.

Now, nearly thirty years later, they were fast friends. They had finally met in the Jesus movement in the early ‘70s. They had weathered all sorts of things over the years. Both had married, both had kids, both had struggled to find time to keep their creative fires burning in the face of the cares of life. They kept each other honest and sharp. They were comfortable together and knew each other well.

Today they would sit at their usual spot at Beach Street and catch up on developments of the past couple of weeks. The rows and rows of baseball caps hanging above the windows all around the cafe would listen in attentively as they talked. The caps had emblems and logos from every imaginable source. They appeared to be contributions from truckers passing through. It had occurred to him that he should ask the waitress the origin and significance of the cap collection. Perhaps he would when she came around with the coffee pot again.