When I was a grad student, one of my favorite social milieu indulgences was to go to the 24-hour 1950s style diner in our smallish college town, at 3:30am to 5:30am. It was very crowded, with shoulder to shoulder at the counter and loud booth conversations sometimes getting unknown neighbors to join in. It was a mix I never saw anywhere else. It was grad student intellectuals on coffee arguing about post-modernism, and the woman with her notebook writing her novel for years in the little time she had away from job and family duties, and drunk frat boys who had excess the bar closing time, and tripping ravers, and anxious insomniacs taking a refuge from their vigil at the hospital — all folks at the tail end of their day — joined by long-haul truckers far from Alabama, living on an inverted clock and having lunch, and college Olympic-class athletes getting their cards and protein before that 5am run or 6am swim, and immigrant janitors in uniform who were getting coffee before going to clean the high school, and 19-year-olds with clip-on ties or plastic imitation patent-leather handbags getting breakfast before a 45-minute drive to their hard-won job as manager who had to open the store at 7am. It was introverts who noticed everything and extroverts who talked intensely yet seemed to miss the forest for the streets. It’s was folks minding their own business thank you very much, and people looking for trouble. It was, in short, everyone. But not the usual mishmash of everyone where there are all anonymous and median, like on the bus, a melting pot. Instead, it was everyone all mixed together, in their distinctive American-ness, their individuality and affinities all fully present, each part of society in equal measure, just a Twilight Zone episode of magic transport from their normal lives into a free-floating focus group, or a Noah’s Arc, the post-nuclear-apocalypse underground bunker gathering of starter yeast ready to start the world over again if called up. It was so ordinary to go that it was nothing. And yet in retrospect, it was everything.