The Denny's Parking Lot by Esther Pearl Watson

This is where I talk about the weather. I am in SF right now, where it's warm enough that I walked slowly back to my hotel last evening wearing a sweater and a cotton scarf that hung loosely because I didn't need to wrap it against the cool-but-not-cold air. In NY, it is bitterly cold and really, really dirty, with week-old snowbanks scattered about, encrusted with soot, layered with left-behind-on-purpose and forgotten things that no one wants to look at, but there they are. You can't really not look, especially if you're out walking the dog and you want your mind on anything but how your shoulders are so tightly clenched against the freezing-ness it's as if they're trying to wrap themselves around your ears.

I don't know what it's like anywhere in Texas right now, but thinking about today's edition by just-outside-of-Fort-Worth native Esther Pearl Watson has me imagining a day so hot that the air ripples, with enough of a breeze to stir up the sand so it gets stuck on the damp hair of your neck, maybe even in your teeth. Esther paints pictures of stories that I want to hear. A few handwritten sentences give away just enough of the plot—suddenly it's not a story, it's a movie and we're building the set, soundtrack and a script. There are spaceships.

In The Denny's Parking Lot, there are child stars who hopefully grow up to be just like Drew Barrymore populating the sound stage, wardrobed in impeccably curated late 70s fashions. I am pretty sure that Esther's dad, builder of the aforementioned spaceships, is played by Jeff Bridges. Heroes and spaceships aside, Esther's at Denny's with her dad, and maybe a sibling who she fought with in the back seat of the station wagon along the way. In the stories most familiar to me, going out to Denny's with dad had something to do with him not living under the same roof with you and mom, who'd cook her own damn ham and eggs, thankyouverymuch. Or maybe she's just sitting this one out at home because she knows that this month's rent is being sacrificed for the used car engine that will most certainly be the exact thing that makes this latest flying saucer fly.

This is where we get to the part where it's possibly easier for this to be a story instead of a memory, with perfectly puffed cotton balls serving as clouds and toothpicks that have bright green Easter grass glued to them standing in for trees. Back then, Denny's was cool and all, but it was hot in the car, and even though Esther was only five or so, it seemed like maybe her mom had a good point about the flying saucers. As a grown-up, Esther can tell the story in a deceptively simple way, referencing the outsider art that she discovered in high school (the same art that made her understand the artistry in her dad's quixotic endeavors) and the comics that make the most painful, awkward episodes of childhood and adolescence fodder for humor, even if some of it is a bit black. She tells these stories over and over, the simplicity and the whimsy expressing something real and universal, about what it is to be a child, and how you remember it, and how what happened then shapes what you become. How she tells it is in no small part due to her dad, so aside from everything else about how growing up with a dad who wanted to build spaceships meant and means, she's got that to thank him for.