Jim Callaway was our neighborhood grocer
way back in the mid-20th century when I was
a teenager--when grocers lived behind the stores
and commuted by taking a few steps forward
in the morning and a few steps back in the afternoon.
I'd bike down 18th Street past Nebraska to Kansas
to Callaway's Englewood Grocery for bread or beans
or Campbell's soup or whatever Mom had scrawled
on her list. Jim was always there waiting for me.
"Have you been over the bridge lately?"
he would ask, if I didn't ask him first.
Then I would tell him what I had seen there
in our mutual land of imagination:
"Yeah, I went back last weekend. They fixed
the bridge. I walked all the way across, and
it was so sunny I had to take off my sweatshirt."
Jim would nod and smile and look out,
between the Maxwell House and Ovaltine posters,
at the gray day--one among many in that lush
Willamette Valley of our mutual reality.
Then I bought what Mom had requested,
plus a Big Hunk and some Milk Duds,
for energy you understand, and if Jim wasn't
too busy (he often wasn't), we'd shoot the breeze
a while longer before I headed home humming,
feeling part of the web of things, appreciated, warm, silly,
and plotting my next trip back over the bridge.
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