Dan came to visit last night. We went to check out the townie bar, a place called The Raven.
Like so many bars, it is a classic, elongated-and-shoved-in-a-city-block kind of place. Great country atmosphere. When we got there, the bar was full. Every seat taken.
We gathered that this was the after work crowd. The drink of choice for everyone was “a shot and a beer.” A shot of Jack and a Light Beer to wash it down. The Video Lottery games were full. People played pool. They have pinball! Three TVs played March Madness, ESPN and Law and Order. The bar folk are friendly and very much bar flies. The juke box played Bob Marly, Queen, Country Music and Eighties Rock (Not new wave).
We watched the closing moments of the Ohio St. and Tenn. game with a fellow named Buck, who “Came down to write up the board (the NCAA bracket on the wall), and get a shot and a beer and go home.”
These people are the absolute salt of the earth. They have families at home or the bar family is their family. They are rough people with hard lives. However, they were welcoming and friendly in their own way. They particularly enjoyed the “Drunken Monkey” game on the new gaming machine on the bar counter.
This is the type of place with a pay phone on the wall. When it rings, the closet person answers, then calls out, “Barbara! You got a call.” Barbara walks slowly from the other end of the bar, cigarette in hand. Everyone has a cigarette, they drink shot after shot, beer after beer. They are there every night.
There is something sad about the community they have built. There is hopelessness, yet there are smiles. There are hard times, but friendships. Life here is simple. I is appealing in a sense. However, it is sad and sometimes pathetic. What kind of lives are these? Are we all like these people? They are broken far worse than so many of us, yet they have community, friendship and laughs. They are stuck, but seem to no longer fight.
What can become of such people? What are their dreams? Do they have a chance, or has it passed them by completely?