February 29th, 2020.
I was sitting inside our vegan bakery café and juice bar.A seemingly impossible stillness, one which ignored boundaries filled the space.
My skin no longer had surface, that point where our body engages with the world. Looking out, the forty feet of glass window that faced the parking lot no longer separated inside from outside.
The silence and stillness of the world was complete. A snow globe which has never been held.
I saw the parking lot empty. The streets were unusually quiet. The rest of the ugly, half vacant late sixties strip mall, that I’ve been in business in for almost twenty five years, was void of any signs of life.
It was a beautiful day.
Across the street is the office building filled with therapistswhere our office is located in the basement. Above, nothing but the sky, blue, as never before.Life hung in suspended animation.
It was only two doors away from The Garden Grille, what I call the old “yellow lab” of our three location, plant based restaurant group, which I opened almost 25 years ago.
Thousands of people a week passed through our doors. Their energy over ten years was infused throughout the space. When we shut down at night, before I set the alarm, I always stopped and looked at the darken seating area, and could feel the intensity of the thousands of peoplewho passed through each week.
Their conversations, laughter, and even their thoughts being tapped onto thekeypads into hundreds of laptops, were infused into the space.I have never felt stillness like this.
Fingerprints from a child, were left on the front of our glass pastry case.I imagined the child leaning in, getting as close to the cupcakes as possible and bouncing on they’re toes, eyes wide turning to the right, towards their mother at the register.
There were no compressors cycling through the condensers. There’s no sounds from the espresso machines, the grinding of the beans, or almond milk steaming in stainless steel containers.
I looked towards the back wall, into the alcove leading to the two bathrooms, separated by a long wall. Our community bulletin board covers the entire wall. I see the business card area on the upper left corner. There’s a poster from Farm Fresh R.I. Winter Market on Saturdays, and a photo of Ben, a black lab, missing since Tuesday. Shri Yoga was having a fundraiser Sunday, and there was a weekend retreat at Brown University’s Center Mindfulness Center.
There were at least a dozen concert band flyers, and the 1970 Volkswagen Beetle still has all of it’s phone number tags, no takers. There were apartments for rent, condos for sale, and German classes starting in April. Outside there were no cars, no people walking, the catering trucks from next door sat idle.
What was most still was my reaction. Nothing about this moment stirred any response.
There was no feeling of concern, worry or alarm that I was sitting in our vegan bakery, in the middle of a weekday completely alone, quiet, not another person in sight.
I woke up, and like a vintage camera flash popping, the dream was imprinted intomy body. I knew not to move. I once read that dreams live inside the body, and to capture the contents and feeling, Its best to lay very still and find the feeling of the dream.
Don’t think or grasp, just feel.
The visceral atmosphere of the dream remained, I relaxed, allowing it to be. There was curiosity, but no fear, no worry, and it was quickly dismissed.
I got out of bed and started my day with little thought about the dream.
Looking back, this lack of response was the sign I missed.
Life in retrospect is pointless.
That night I briefly reflected on the dream before falling asleep. I still felt it, without concern.
The next morning’s late winter sunrise filtered through the still bare tree branches and woke me up. Immediately I remembered this dream. It was easy.
It was exactly the same dream, except it took place two doors down from Wildflour, inside the Garden Grille vegetarian restaurant, I had opened almost twenty five years earlier.
Was I so done with the businesses, that after two consecutive dreams about our businesses becoming still, quiet and empty of human activity, there was no fight or flight response?
No internal alarms, nothing.
I thought it was odd, and it had an eerily haunting aspect, but no, it in no way left me in fear.
Not like that dream I had in 1990 did, when I dreamt all the ground beneath my feet broke apart, falling away and I was left with nothing but ruins. I awoke shaking in a sweat. Nine months later I had to file bankruptcy when the Golden Sheaf, the natural foods market my mom Erna started in 1971, was put out of business by larger mass market competition, what became one of the first large natural foods supermarket chains in the country.
I had to sell my home for less than the mortgage, my car was repossessed and sometimes I could only fill the tank halfway. It was a dream come true.
Did success take away the edge? Was I getting older and just done dealing with restaurants? So much has changed since the late eighties.
A little over two weeks later, on Monday, March the 16th, the governor ordered the immediate total shutdown of all indoor dining in the state of Rhode Island, due to the approaching spread of the new Corona virus, Covid-19 as we would come to call it.
After a meeting with our director of operations and our executive chef, before the governor’s announcement around 11 am, we decided it was not safe, or in the best interests of either staff or customers to remain open.
By noon we had laid off over a hundred staff, between our three locations. We greeted each customer up until the governor’s announcement and with sadness and some hugs expressed looking forward to reopening, hopefully in about six to eight weeks at the very most.
