Why We Lunch

Jane gets the Jimmy Legs. There is a rather well known episode of Seinfeld where Kramer is complaining that his girlfriend "has the jimmy legs". In the same episode, Mr. Costanza admits that his wife has a "jimmy arm." Apparently this phenomenon is real, only they don't call it Jimmy Legs, they call it RLS, or Restless Leg Syndrome. I kid you not.

According to the medical journals, one in ten Americans suffer from RLS, a twitching or nervous discomfort usually settling in the legs and sometimes arms and is usually associated with insomniacs and people with circulation issues. Stress is also a contributing factor.



Symptoms have been described such as "feeling like your legs are being dipped in coca-cola," or "maggots are crawling around under the skin." The result is that they constantly move their legs about. Jimmy Legs.

Jane gets jimmy legs when she's tired and needs to get to bed. That's often how she'll announce that she's tired. "I've got jimmy legs," she'll say. "I've got to go to bed."

But Jane gets a different kind jimmy in her legs. Like when she's been cooped up in the house for too long and needs to get out. I don't mean to the store or the dry cleaner, but someplace where she can enjoy an adult beverage and conversation.

This past Sunday we decided we needed to get out and "blow the stink off". We settled on Smithville, a small historic town about forty minutes north of us. It's basically just a collection of shops (mostly junk) with a few restaurants thrown in. It's someplace to go where there are always bound to be other people. At least we get to pretend we're doing something productive. The reality is, all we ever do is find a place to eat lunch and get a few drinks. Everything else is just there to make us feel like we did something more. For instance, we'll walk around and window shop, sometimes buying something, but the real purpose of the trip is to eat lunch. This is our main activity together.

Where to eat is our other big problem. There are really only so many places we can go and many of them we've either worn out or never liked in the first place. Already we're traveling farther and farther away just for the privilege of ordering beer and wine someplace new. The food is usually the same. Salads. Burgers. Turkey sandwich. Throw in the occasional crab cake, homemade fries and French onion soup, and you pretty much get the idea. It's TGI Friday's without the flare.

We settled on a place we'd never eaten before, an old historic building with two working fireplaces. Normally this would be right up our alley but I'll bet we've walked in, and then right back out, several times before because the minute you walk in you are struck by one undeniable fact: The place is full of senior citizens. The menu is your basic fare, just one notch up from bar food, in portions that allow the elderly to take something home in styrofoam. But for the first time, we came in through the wrong door and found ourselves in a wood-paneled bar with a fireplace large enough to sleep two. The room was cold, the fire seemingly having just been started, and we were the only ones in the room, but we decided to take the table next to the fire and at least have one drink. A few more logs were thrown on the fire (a rotating line of young men took turns feeding the fire), a second round of drinks were ordered and a few more people filed in. Being more or less comfortable at this point, we decided to stay for lunch.

As we sat there, full and happy and on our third round of drinks, I had to laugh. The room we were in very much resembled our own dining room, complete with our seats in front of the fireplace. We had driven close to forty miles to sit in front of the fire and drink beer, which is exactly what we would have been doing had we been home. We'd just moved locations. As Jane often says when we travel to a friend or relative's house, and she finds herself, once again in the kitchen, "Same sink, different location."

We are creatures of habit and our needs are simple. Often what we need is not something new to do, but someplace new to do it. In the summer, we can spend the day at the beach together, simply lying in the sun. Jane can do this and relax. But if we were home lying on chairs in the sun, things that needed to be done would call to her like sirens in the sea. And then she'd start calling out to me. I love the beach.

Stephen King writes in his memoir that when he was drinking heavily (he is now a recovering alcoholic) he had to pour out any unopened beers in the fridge because he knew they would be calling to him all night. That's Jane, only she's a compulsive doer. She finds it difficult to sit still.

In fact, she is constantly confounded by my ability to accomplish so little, at least by her standards. Jane likes to see progress, likes to have the fruits of her labor all around her. She loves the smell of new paint, because like the Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, it smells like victory.

I enjoy sitting. Paul Reiser in his book, "Couplehood" speaks at great length about his enjoyment of sitting. For instance, rather than moving to dislodge the channel changer he's almost definitely sitting on, he'll just deal with the discomfort. He goes on to say, "...now if you understand how affection for sitting, multiply that a couple of times and you can imagine my enthusiasm for lying down." I know what he's talking about.

But my inactivity has a purpose, however flawed in my wife's logic. I can sit in a chair on my computer all day. That's not an exaggeration. I'm talking eight, ten hours. I get up to use the facilities or to refill my coffee cup, refresh my cocktail, or put another log on the fire. But other than that, I'm content to just sit there.

So what do I do, my wife always wants to know? A multitude of things, some worth mentioning, others hardly so. To start with, the Internet is a world wide web to be sure. You can get lost in it and never return. When the mood strikes me, I write. Sometimes I search for and download music. Other times I order books, either the real thing or the downloadable kind. Other times I'm just "window shopping"?looking at things I have no intention of buying but may be fantasizing about buying. It could be anything.

I also belong to several on-line communities: two featuring writing and two featuring photography. I post stories and pictures, comment on other people's stories and pictures, and sometimes, comment on other people's comments on both mine and other people's stories and pictures. It's a full time job. I'm only really home two days a week. It's a wonder I get done as much as I do if you ask me.

Between Jane's Jimmy Legs and my penchant for "sitting and staring at that damn computer" there are days when Jane and I wouldn't see that much of each other, if it weren't for our outings. That's why lunch is so important. We don't NEED to go out to lunch, but it's like neutral ground. She doesn't feel pressured to repaint the upstairs hallway and while I always bring my journal?and often a book?we tend to look at each other and talk.

Although, when you think about it, between the driving to and fro, and the actual meal itself, it does amount to quite a lot of sitting. Which is just fine with me.

In The Shadow of Sandia

The sign was hand lettered and nailed to a pole near the road. It read, "Lost. Two Golden Retrievers." At the bottom was the name and phone number of the owners. It was basically your run of the mill Lost Dog poster but this was Albuquerque, the foothills of the mountains of New Mexico, a place where bears and mountain lions are known to take off with their share of domestic cats and dogs. For these two lost dogs, there was a pretty fair chance that they'd fallen prey to wilder beasts than themselves.



The Southwest is beautiful country but the beauty is a subtle thing; not immediately apparent to someone accustomed to the lush green, and rounded edges of the East. New Mexico can seem a harsh place, dry and barren. There are large tracts of land in which the only thing that grows are the types of tough grasses and scrub brush that can withstand the near desert climate. Even the trees seem stunted by comparison, small, gnarled pines that resemble old arthritic women. But like the Native peoples who occupied this land since before the Christians launched their Crusades, what lives here, is that which can survive.

My first visit here left me with little love of the place. I couldn't see the beauty. And I'm not talking about inner beauty or anything so trivial. I'm talking about God-inspired beauty that can take your breath away. The truth, I've since discovered, is that that sort of beauty is not just here, it's a central part of its essence.

The land, and the people who live here, have a different mindset that only begins to explain their fierce devotion to the land. It is, in fact, a quantum difference from the soft East, and you have to train your mind to appreciate the nuances of life here.

Part of the difference is the speed of life. It's not so drastic as say life in South America or even the Deep South of the United States, but things definitely move at a different pace. It's not at first even a perceptible shift, but more of a feeling that life here has it's own rhythms and cycles and that until you become attuned to them, you are forced to interpret what you see in the light of your own experiences, rather than how they really are.

The first thing you notice is how different the light is here. At over 6500' feet above sea level, the light behaves differently. Unlike other places in the world, especially the terminally overcast Northeast, the sun is a constant entity. While rain does fall, it comes and leaves quickly, leaving an almost fire-cured freshness to everything. But already civilization has begun to change even that. As more and more homes are built, even with their tiny patches of lawn and dwarfed trees, the climate has begun to change. The same is true of other desert climates such as Las Vegas where the average rainfall is significantly higher than it was even forty years ago, a huge leap in terms of changes in weather patterns that historically take hundreds or even thousands of years to change even slightly.

This is still the frontier. It hasn't been tamed by man, or squashed by industry. Back home, most things capable of harming you, with the exception of mosquitoes and poison ivy have been systematically exterminated.

We don't stand much for danger in our nation's oldest section of the world. We leave that for the frontier. In the East, we deal with the occasional snowstorm of six to eight inches and we endure the weeks of sunless winter days, but other than that, we don't really have to deal with a lot of adversity.

We don't have earthquakes or tornadoes. For the most part, we don't see floods or forest fires. No mudslides or hurricanes threaten our mobile homes. And avalanches are unheard of. About the worst we can expect are French Canadian tourists. I know that sounds terrible, but I know some people who would argue that they'd prefer riots to French Canadians. There are times when I would agree.

But today, I'm in wild country. In the past six months, there have been several bear attacks within an hour of where I now sit. One occurred in the mountains near here, where a grandmother of ninety-eight was attacked and killed while cooking beans in her kitchen. Now I don't know a lot about bears, but from where I come from, that's pretty brazen.

Another incident was reported within months of the elderly woman being killed, where a man was forced to shoot a bear that he found in his house. I'm not a member of the NRA, nor do I support unconditional rights for gun owners, but this seems to me to be a perfect example of why Americans should be able to own guns.

Sure, England doesn't have the guns we have, nor the violent crime that goes with it, but you don't hear about anyone in Nottingham Forrest getting eaten by bears while eating fish and chips in the kitchen. The founding fathers knew we had bears, mountain lions and the occasional French Canadian when they wrote the constitution. We may be a unified and sophisticated nation, but much of our great country is still pretty wild.

Just a few months before my brother-in-law Patrick and his wife Hae-Jung had their baby, they were hiking just a few miles from where I now sit at the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. Patrick was walking ahead of Hae-Jung with the dogs when he came to an arroyo, a kind of dry creek bed, and came face-to-face with 400lb black bear.

No matter where you live, you never really expect to run into a bear. At first, Patrick thought it was a dog and looked up to see if he could locate its owner. Then he took another look, and a good look it was since he was only standing about six feet away, and he realized that he was starring into the face of a bear with his pregnant wife only several yards behind him.

Fortunately, the bear decided there were better places to be right at that moment and he took off up the mountainside.

The wild nature of this place can touch you in unexpected ways. I don't know if they can be described as good or bad. The human race, in general, has the tendency to judge the world around us as good and bad in terms of how it effects us personally. Sometimes, nature is not good or bad. It just is. In this instance the bear went its way and my brother-in-law went his. No reason for it really, just the way it happened.

But surely this is beautiful country, where the sun shines almost constantly, the humidity is low and the sunsets brilliant. Perhaps it is the harshness that helps one appreciate the delicate nature of its beauty. I don't honestly know. I'm not sure if I have an answer, but I have hope.

A few miles down the road from the first lost dog sign, we came upon another sign; it read, "Found: Two Golden Retrievers."

I don't know if these two signs were related. I don't know if the people who made these two signs ever found each other. Within a few miles of one another were both the seekers and the keepers of the lost. Did they ever find one another? I don't know. But I hope so.

Meanwhile the sun sets to the west and reflects across the Sandia Mountains in brilliant patterns of light and we sit here at the foothills and watch the stars come out one by one. It is a magnificent gift from God and for this I am grateful. There is so much about this world I don't understand. So much about a loving God that seems contradictory with the harsh reality of our lives. But tonight, I sit beneath the same stars that Abraham saw and thank God for the grace to see another day.

It is so little and yet, it is enough. Or so I hope.