Bittersweet, Were her Kisses! (Ch: 10/Jerry's Bar; and conclulsion)

Thirty-nine years Later (winter of 2006) 10
Jerry’s New Bar ((Narrated by Lee Stone))


“I’m going to tell you it was a long journey, from when I met Sandy, to where I stood this day, thirty-nine years long, before I heard her name again. Funny how someone you once meet, comes back into your life, zigzag-idly, throughout the yeas.
I met Jerry’s brother at the Capitol Bank on Rice street, the winter of 2006, and asked him how Jerry was, I knew he had a new bar on Rice Street, in St. Paul, Minnesota, but I had not really visited it since I quit drinking long ago, but he said, “Lee, he’s in the bar now,” and so I followed him down the street a half mile, and I saw his brother talking to someone on the phone, through my and his car windows, and when I got to the bar, Jerry greeted me, said “Last time I heard you were traveling all over the world,” and I said, “I had been back for many years now, but actually taking off a few times each year going to China and India and so forth, so I guess I have been gone in that sense.”
He then showed me his bar, and pictures on the walls of his grandchildren, he was proud. He smiled a few times. Said he was once married, fought cancer.
It was mid morning and the sun was up, with a pale blue sky, he said, “Yup, its been a long time,” as we walked over by his window, looked out it, then he asked, “You ever see Sandy?” A chilly-like draft seemed to hit my nerves, like a piano key, out of sink, I think I was surprised he mentioned her, I mean it was close to forty-years since her and I dated, and I had only seen her once for a few minutes, and here her name comes up. I didn’t know if I should laugh for cry, I was lightly struck, “Sandy,” I said with a light-bulb smile, I wished I had a better smile to give but I felt he had misdialed, I said,
“Sandy, no, I hadn’t…why?” I think I almost had a hernia, but I suppose, the last time I saw him was actually when she and I and he were what you might call a thing, for lack of a better word.
Well, first thing you know, he informed me, “…she comes down here now and then, you know.” Well I didn’t know, and wasn’t sure if I cared, but it was interesting.
“Really,” I said, in a rhetorical way.
“Yup, she sits over there and drinks and talks….”
I get thinking, ‘no change from the old Sandy I knew,’ and asked, “How does she look now?”
He didn’t seem to want to answer that question for me, “Said you really look like a writer,” however that is or maybe, he was avoiding the question, and so I said again, “Well, how does she…look?” He looks at me hooked mouth, and so he told me in the kindest way he could I suppose, ‘not all the good,’ with a few dramatic looks on the edges of those words.”’



[Conclusion] And so Lee and Jerry, said their goodbyes, and each went their ways. Lee, to Peru and Panama for a while, and Jerry, last Lee heard he was still at his bar on Rice Street; and to be truthful, after thinking about it a while, he, Lee was not all that surprised Sandy was at the bar Jerry owned, after he thought about it a while that is: for we do often become products of our environments (most of us anyways); I think it was just the oddity in life itself that caught Lee off guard, that is to say, how small earth and time mixed up in a bowel of life and crickets can be, you never know when one will jump out, and who, and what it will bring.