This place needs me here to start. This place is the beat of my heart. –“Oh My Heart,” –R.E.M
3A.M. that last summer at the diner, and I’d wake and stare at the ceiling, my mind churning in the mud of my bafflement and grief. 4 a.m., and I’d shuffle to the couch, where I’d gaze for a while into the dark. By 5, I’d be slumped into the cushions surfing the internet, thinking I should stop, but not stopping. I’d visit eBay. Trailers.com. Vintagetrailers.com. Vintagefoodtrucks.com. Page after page, I’d click through, considering Airstreams, Arrows and Alohas, Scottys, Shastas and Spartans. Invisibly, hours would pass. Suddenly it would be time to wake Rick up and get ourselves and the dog into the truck and head to Grand Marais and open the diner. Our diner, our Paramount Road King diner built in New Jersey in 1949, our diner we had restored in 1997 and run together ever since. Our diner, which we had now decided to sell. Processing that idea was like trying to understand how far away the sun is or picturing what a billion donuts laid end to end would look like. It was like considering hacking off my own arm or ripping a lung from my chest and putting it up on the open market. Nonetheless, we were doing it. We had run headlong into cancer the summer before, a cancer we had not expected Rick to survive. We had seen, along with the abyss of death, which
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