When I was about 18 and in college, I assumed that things would just work a certain way, and that a road would just unveil itself and invite me to follow it.  To beg me.  "Please, Mr. Wood, we need you.  You are what we have been waiting for."  That the world would open her arms to me, and I would come to New York or some equivalent Avalon, and would at the moment I get there--have an epiphanous moment where I knew who I was, and where I was going.  And the door would be open.  Then, all I would have to do is follow my bliss, and draw and paint and write, and the world would love me or hate me--but they would know me.

But it, of course didn't happen.

As Woody once wrote on a card for Bob Dylan, "I ain't dead yet."  But, the imaginary door I envisioned for my life is invisibly closing further with each passing holiday.  WIth each grey hair on my head.  With each new word my baby tries to say.  Life comes crashing slowly, tearing apart my dreams of them all knowing me.  And the chances of disappearing into oblivion are growing ever more likely.  A day will come when Joe Wood's canvases are stacked, not so gently, in the middle of a floor.  Some will end up in thrift shops.  Some will be thrown away.  Some will find a home, where people who feel like nobody will cherish them.

I will never be James Dean.  I will never wheel the guitar like Pete Townsend.  I won't write Prufrock, nor light up the parties where they eat out of my every breath like Truman Capote.  A voice, and a shadow, and at moments a rock star--to 3 little people in St. Louis is what I really am, while the world moves on. 

What the cafe has given me really is a chance to feel like I am somebody, even though in reality, I am just somebody's dad.  Here, I am a voice, whimpering during a whirlwind.  If one can find me, which here they can, I can be that person I want to be.  I can sit at the mike and be Jack Buck and call the game.  Or, I can be myself.  I can kneel at the confessional behind the screen, and tell it all.

The beauty of being a big fish in a small pond, of being known in a small town, of being a face in a crowd of people only you may ever know, but they're the people you'd choose if it were really up to you--that is what I feel when I can't sleep, or I am excited by something.  Or when I am scared, because I am powerless, and can feel it in my bones.  Yet I put words down, thoughts, and set fire to my own ideas, and see what happens.  It is like art.  I drag my stick in the mud, and see what becomes of it. 

I don't know if people realize it or not, but the trend of making homogeneous the places and people we discover has less and less time for people like us, people who are interesting and interested.  And we need to cling to small roadside cafe's like TPM, where we can fill an afternoon or a long lonely night with ideas and dreams.  Though I hate to admit it, I need a dimly lit cafe sometimes.