To the Editor:
What? O’Rourke’s, up in smoke? There’s no way.
The flames that burned down O’Rourke’s Diner the other day rage inside me now, even in Madrid where I find myself, living and working and raising a family, pangingly unable to extinguish its combustive yet hearthwarming heat.
Reputedly the widest Main Street in all of small-town America, Middletown’s main drag bestows on the 1940’s diner-car restaurant the eternal, meritorious title of “Small-Town Jeweled Crown.”
Anchoring the North End of Middletown’s Main Street just as one catches sight of bridges there over the Connecticut River—one with a flaming red “W” embedded in its truss-work that remains emblazoned in my sixteen-years-out-of-school mind’s eye, hovering reflected in the silver dawn river water, from Freshman-Year 5:00 A.M. daily Wescrew boathouse-and-river practice-sessions, followed by steaming brownbread muffins as a sidedish to Brian O’Rourke’s diced and fried sweet potatoes spiced with hot-blood paprika—O’Rourke’s beckons me back to that sleepy and sleepless place in my memory time and time again, at dawn, noon, dusk, and midnight.
At 4:30 A.M. my Senior Year, making my way down to Main Street to pick up the public bus to Hartford to teach painting to inmates of the now-defunct downtown Morgan Street Jail, I would shore my stuporous self up with a retaining wall of Brian’s hearty fare, washing it down with mug after heavy ceramic mug of coffee, and small talk with waitresses, truck drivers, and cleaning ladies.
There’s a whitewashed colonial building next-door to O’Rourke’s that had been dragged uphill by work-horses atop rolling logs to Main Street from down by the river, to save it from the seasonal violence of flooding; can we save O’Rourke’s now from the flames, drag the train-car to safety?
There’s the Aunt Polly that once puttered by and docked nearby, a cruise-ferry witnessing the forgotten layers of the Connecticut River between O’Rourke’s and The Goodspeed Opera House presiding over East Haddam.
Then, in O’Rourke’s itself, there we were, ringing in the daybreak while ringing out the tight briefs and political cartoons of each Friday Issue of the Argus to hit the printer’s, debating the origin of bullet-casings spent atop Foss Hill—and the whereabouts of one stolen cannon—over blueberry buckwheat pancakes and still more coffee in leaden white mugs.
Oh, Rourke!
Oh, Diner!
Olympia Diner along the Berlin Turnpike just doesn’t hold a coffee mug to you! O’Rourke’s: build it (again) and we will come, again and again, day-for-night, following the warmth and scent of your hearth.
Sincerely,
Alex Levi
Leave a Reply