I paid my check and stepped outside to ‘finish’ my meal with a customary smoke… An area right in front of the place had some patio style metal picnic tables with awnings and matching chairs right outside the front entrance… the only public entrance. They were in an area set off by a chain loosely strung between metal, free-standing posts, and the whole thing was rather attractive and inviting…

All of this was new since my last visit there… I figured they were still trying to respond to their market and remain relevant and appealing… like any other business that hopes to survive indefinitely. This particular business had managed to keep its doors open and the grease flying since 1927.

CF Penn Hamburgers is located a hundred feet or so west of Second Avenue on the south side of Moulton Street in downtown Decatur, Alabama. It has been there since the early seventies; before that, just a few hundred feet east of there on the other side of Second Avenue, also on the south side of Moulton Street. A short distance physically, another galaxy in other ways…

Visiting that place has become for me something like an annual pilgrimage… The place and its fare are nothing much to speak of, but the flood of memories they trigger is well worth my time and effort. Each visit concludes the same way… Yours truly ‘standing on the corner’ of Memory Lane and Nostalgia Boulevard.

My first visit to that eatery was in June 1962 at the tender age of fifteen… four months before my sixteenth birthday. A time of great upheaval, difficult stress, and profound change in my life and in the world around me…

Our nation was being forced to come to grips with the legacy of tragic race relations and unimaginable injustice, poor people were demanding improvement in their lives and prospects for their futures, young people were expressing, sometimes violently, their displeasure and disgust with ‘the old order’, and they, too, would settle for nothing less than complete overhaul.

This was all new stuff to most ordinary folks, particularly those of us in the serene, cloistered, ‘steady’ world of north Alabama. There was a strong undercurrent of apprehension and fear with the prospects of tossing out the familiar ‘realities’ and replacing them with… who knew what…

Our information was in large part provided by the same media that, then as now, looks more for sensational headlines than deeper meaning and genuine understanding, so that added distortion to events and considerable fuel to the fires of uncertainty and risk, while also providing notoriety and encouragement to the more outrageous actors in this tragic drama.

A considerable amount of ‘information’ came from interacting with peers and colleagues. While useful to some extent, more often than not it resulted in reinforcement of already generally believed ‘facts’ within various groups, and group-think only deepened beliefs in ‘our view is the correct view’, while they became more entrenched within each camp.

Another source of ‘information’ came from thought… introspection, consideration, contemplation, and reasoning. Even that was limited in its usefulness, however, because the prism through which all information and inputs are refracted is filtered by the construct of our own value systems, belief systems, logic of life… everything that gives us our view of ourselves and the world around us. ‘Facts’ are indeed ‘facts’, but our interpretation of them can vary widely based upon differences in our ‘prisms’. To the extent any of that is incomplete, inaccurate, or faulty, much of our thought winds up being flawed.

Some figured anything was better than what we had, so the risk of potential failure and social collapse was perfectly acceptable, arguably even preferable. Others had their whole lives invested in the ‘reality’ of what is and has been, and significant change brought with it the risk of losing everything. Nothing quite like this had ever happened to these folks before, so there was no body of knowledge-based experience for them to look to for answers or to search for a blueprint on how to deal with it.

To the hopeless and helpless, change, almost any change, was highly desirable. To the modestly successful, the somewhat stable, the relatively secure, the ones with their life savings tied up in assets dependent upon ‘normalcy and stability’, change was threatening beyond their worst nightmares.

None of these people created the situation they now found themselves in, but they all had a huge stake in the outcome… The battle lines were drawn as they always are, along the lines of perceived self-interest… all dressed up to appear like fundamental truths and very noble causes…

With all of that as a backdrop, my dad received another promotion… and with it a transfer. Our move was only about fifty miles to another town in the same state, but to us kids it might as well have been to the dark side of the moon. Other than members of our immediate family, we knew absolutely no one.

Every person we encountered was a total stranger. To them we were also complete strangers. Nothing familiar save our furniture and each other provided any link to our frame of reference. There was no base, no foundation, no stability that comes from knowing where you are and what’s going on around you. It was confusing, fearful, dangerous in some ways, and we could see nothing good at all in this for us. Dad and to a lesser extent our mother had very different experiences.

It seems so simple now looking back on those times… Hindsight is 20/20, they say, and for good reason. By now we’ve all dealt with heretofore unthinkable change, dislocations, relocations, and turmoil. We’ve muddled through so much uncertainty that it no longer poses anywhere near the same level of threat it once did. We’ve survived, often even flourished, through it all, and now we can see how advantageous all of that can be. Before any of that, however, we knew nothing of the possibilities and promise change might offer…

We focused mainly upon the risk of catastrophe, the awkwardness of insecurity, and the unpleasantness of total uncertainty… not entirely unlike other upheaval throughout our nation at that same time. When the stakes are high enough, any of us will tend to fear the worst rather than excitedly anticipate wonderful possibilities with the uncertainty of blind change… When you don’t know what, if anything, you might gain, but you realize you could lose everything… well…

We did struggle through all of that… my siblings and I. Our nation has still, unfortunately, not found its way through the maze and morass… Perhaps there are some similar lessons that are transferable from one line of thought to the other…? One thing is for sure… Individuals are going to have to figure all of this out. Government and politicians, in particular, will not… because they cannot.

My siblings and I all survived that tumultuous summer of 1962, and in nearly every way we all three wound up better off because of that move. Our nation, too, has survived, and while we haven’t really solved any of the vexing problems that confronted us then, we have indeed made considerable progress.

Progress is not possible without change. Change, however, is possible without progress. Ones appetite for risk regarding change is based almost entirely upon how ones sees him/herself in the mix of things…

Do I have little or nothing to gain but everything to lose? If so, then you will find me more than a little bit reluctant to exhibit revolutionary zeal. Do I have little or nothing to lose but much to gain…? Then by all means throw it all out and start over!

‘Right’ and ‘wrong’ do figure into all of this, of course, but even those concepts are relatively easy to manipulate and bend towards perceived self-interest… After all, we as a nation once rationalized and justified slavery, racial hierarchies, and the notion that gender differences alone determined abilities didn’t we?

I’ve been asked, “What is so special about Penn’s?” Nothing, really… but I’d truly hate to miss standing on that corner…