Few indeed. Meager light. The Last Mile faces west to the front. July 2nd, 10:21 a.m., not a single patron yet. The Mile opens at 9:00 for those souls who need companionship, hopefully not a drink. Thursday regulars were certain to show up by lunch time. The Mile’s owner Joe Barron had driven over from his summer home in Swampscott. He, bartender Deano and I ( who had some sense that I needed to stop by the way one might stop by a church) sat at a table by the juke box, listening to the rattle of the still defective right wall air conditioner, while we were being cooled only by the single left wall unit beside the bar.
I can’t tell you much about what we said to that point, having sat about an hour — except that Joe talked with Deano, who had a pad in front of him and a pencil in hand — about supplies for the little July 4th gathering among the gravel, weeds and scrawny oak trees along the back fence in the small back lot.
It has been very hot in Massachusetts, hot across the country and the planet. Joe and Deano decided to go out and look at the back lot, see what needed to be cleaned up out there. I felt privileged to join them. I was going to leave — what am I but just an occasional patron? But both Joe and Deano said, “you come, too, Greg.” I felt like the guy must have felt when the poet Robert Frost said (basically to all of us in that one poem), “you come, too,”as they went out to the meadow.
The inadequacy of the back lot for such a celebration immediately struck Joe. He said, “I want to invite everybody over to my yard in Swampscott, have a catered gathering for the regulars,” Joe said.
But Deano said, “that’d be fine if that’s what you want, Joe. But tradition says we have a little time out back here.”
I agreed. There had been a Fourth of July gathering for every year I could recall outback of The Last Mile.
Then came an intervention.
The artist Knox, (though we hadn’t noticed him working quietly on a canvass on his back veranda), sealed the deal when he surprised us by shouting down, “I’m looking forward to weekend festivities in our domain of sumac and oak.”
No. the three of us hadn’t notice Knox up above us– and I hadn’t ever noticed the sumac growing up in the south corner of the 50×50 lot. Red and obcure. I should have known sumac springs up everywhere, always in the city, as if its most unreconized and uncelebrated tree.
Then came a sound.
“Ah, listen to that chorus,” Knox said.
He was referring to the cicadas, their pulsating high-pitched buzz commencing suddenly from the few meager neighborhoods trees in that very crowded purlieu of gravel, weeds, cracked macadam and rows of old, crammed-together city houses. This, even though we were far from the verdant country. And it has always seemed to me that choruses of cicadas are like sirens announcing the rising of the heat. And the heat was rising. We knew it would be mounting through the day.
And Knox stood hanging over his veranda railing, staring off like Balboa.
And so — there would be a back lot gathering behind The Last Mile for America’s bigger than usual birthday.
I’ll be there.
19 Cent Notebook 