You might have seen a small, stooped old man, shuffling down the sidewalk…



hair disheveled, shirt buttoned wrong, shoes on the wrong feet…Here's what I saw...




Note Card: A Stranger and Pilgrim Observes a Hardee's Dining Room

Written on a 4x6 note card by Stan Julin.

[Blog Author's Note:  My father was a regular patron of the Ocoee Hardee's, where he spent many of his mornings and where many of the note cards featured on this site were written.  He was not quite the pariah he seems to describe below.  My son accompanied him one morning and reports that my father took him all around the Hardee's dining room, introducing him to all of the other regulars who, as a matter of habit, congregated there each morning.  My dad's sense of aloneness stemmed from the fact that he was so heavily invested in the next world that he had not the knowledge or ambition to pursue many things which occupy the minds of others.]

August 17, 2002
I can look around Hardee's and see worldly-wise men, assured, "successful", engrossed in their pursuits, talking with their families, in their own little worlds.  I am not one [of them] but a stranger...They would be bored with me, which is fine.  I couldn't succeed if I doubled my speed, for I'm not going that way.  To them I'm a stranger, yes...to myself also a pilgrim.

1 comment:

  1. Even in his writings you can see his love for Bunyan's Pilgram's Progress.

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