There was the dog.  Just sitting there looking at me as if nothing had happened the previous day.  Not even showing the slightest interest in me.  Waiting until I’m boring into its eyes with my laser beam vision, trying to figure out if I’m going to hear it speak again.  And then stretching its back leg out and bending its head in with gymnastic aplomb, and licking its balls.

Schwartzkopf didn’t even acknowledge me as I came in.  Just looked down at the pooch as it licked it balls, patted its head and said, “Good boy, I bet that feels good.”  Which made me like Schwartzkopf even more as I’d seen some owners smack their dogs and deny them their basic right to do that which we as boys would surely have become addicted to doing. . .

The old man knew it was me though.   As I approached the counter to order a coffee and a blueberry muffin, he called me over.  “Just a sec,” I said, “I’m just going to get my coffee and a bite.”

He waved at the chair across from him, vacant, but with a coffee cup steaming there, and a muffin with the butter melting on its split halves. . .  Just exactly what I was going to order.  I nodded to Shannon behind the counter and she just shrugged her shoulders as if to say “don’t ask me!”   I walked over and noted that there was even cream in the coffee already.  Had he known I was going to show up soon?  Spies?  Bugs?  Hidden cameras recording my every move?

“Rex here told me you were coming, so I took the liberty of ordering something I thought you might like,” said the old boy as I sat down across from him.  This was the same spot we had been sitting a month ago when the bomb had gone off.  No one would ever had known the devastation that had happened that day looking at where we were now.  The same tables, walls painted the same colour, same prints on the walls. . .  I wondered if Shannon had bought the same limited edition prints, or had they been restored by the artist?

What a beautiful decoration snow is

falling silently flake upon flake

each crystal reaching for the next in the air

but only making the connection upon landing.

A billion little souls, each with their own identity,

falling silently flake upon flake

living for a moment or two in obscurity

before becoming lost in the first inch, foot or yard.

Am I falling still, a soul with my own unique crystalline structure?

Or am I crushed in the masses of a snowbank?

Do I feel free and light and drifting?

Or am I crushed, massed, compressed and lack any individuality?

Am I the snowflake falling or fallen?