Tag Archives: Small Town

THE BARNSTORMER AND THE BOY

Pilots, Ranch Life, Relationships / tagged , / / by

THE BARNSTORMER AND THE BOY

In the little plane, just the pilot and me
up up up into the prairie air

Climbing and gliding and floating free
high above the county fair

The town looked small from way up there
but hell… it looked small from anywhere

It was the changing people into ants
that I loved the best and wanted again

Being on the wrong side of relative bigness
had been causing me a lot of pain

CHINESE RESTAURANT

Nostalgia / tagged , , , / / by

CHINESE RESTAURANT

Sorry John Donne
but some men may be islands

or castaways
in small prairie towns
fifty miles by bad road
from any other of their race

Tall walled booths along one side
twisted-wire chairs and tables too
my father and his friends had coffee
I think mine was cream soda

We may have eaten there
but I don’t remember
certainly at five or six
I would not have imagined
that we were as strange to him
as he was to us

All I ever knew
of the inner man
was the pungent foreignness
of the old two-holer out back

Fast forward six years or so
to small town of Mossbank
on the South side of the lake

A chubby twelve year old
sits in a low walled booth
with his best buddies
and another Chinese man
in another Chinese café
serves up vanilla cokes
(when vanilla still had alcohol)
and marks our tabs with Chinese signs

I asked him what my three mean

Big – Small – Happy

THE BEER PARLOR

Nostalgia / tagged , , / / by

THE BEER PARLOR

Politics and weather

Little round seated chairs
no-one could have sat on
ten minutes completely sober

Little round tables
completely covered at last call
fluted glasses perfectly filled
to the well marked tide line
(no charging for foam here)

Smell of well aged
beer, barf and barn boots
but no matter, it was men only
and they didn’t seem to care

In the service of progress I guess
it was decided by the province
that each town could vote
on women being allowed
to enter these sacred halls

George, the owner,
a man of steady habits
and unshakable prejudices
thinly disguised as principles
said “If you vote for this I close the place”
They did, and he did