I Don't Know, Chuck

"I don't know."

The man, sitting in his familiar restaurant, a plate-- an altar of half-a-sausage and mashed potatoes--is on the table. I see his face, all that I can remember now, grizzled and wrinkled with the age of years and years of life knows what--a persistent sign of what time does to a body, a face.

That face.

His face, much younger, remains in perpetuity on the hallway wall of a high school that doesn't even carry the same name as the one he sojourned so long ago.  He is a memory.  A picture now for many but a memory for me.

I see the face.  Remember the moment, remember the timbre of his voice.

"I don't know."

He repeats the phrase.  Over.  And over.

Im not sure he knows he does it.  It covers the silence between each moment passed between us.  He says it, to fill a void, within or without, that must be named as un-knowledge.

In his un-knowing perhaps he knows more than he lets on.  The words are far more than a placeholder, a time-holder, or a conversation-holder, if you will.  He says them in diminishing vim.  Their initial burst is startling but, in a way, comforting for their frequency and fidelity.  They come, they go.  They come, they go.  I hear them even now.

"I don't know."

He died.  I don't remember how or when or why.  I lost track as I often do.  I didn't even attend his funeral.  But I miss those words.

"I don't know."

My last memory.  He is there, sitting on a plastic cushion bench.  The booth is his.  He sits there in my memory.  He must.  I see him, after all, and I hear him, voice as clear as it was then.  He sits.  He sits.  He speaks.

His plate is the same dish--as always.

His words unchanging, eternal.

"I don't know."

I don't know either, Chuck.

But I remember....