Why I'm Not Making Dinner Right Now

I woke up at 3:45 this morning, in a motel room with Epiphany and Crispina. Epiphany had a plane to catch at 6:30, which meant presenting herself at the airport no later than 5:30. By 4:20, all three of us were up, showered, dress, packed and ready, but as the airport was only a mile away, this seemed like overkill in the department of promptitude, so we sat back down, got out our prayer books, and read Morning Prayer aloud together.

By the time we finished, it was 4:35. We hauled our little bags and Epiphany's enormous one, packed for two weeks in a dorm room, downstairs. I checked us out, and we drove to the airport, where we joined a growing crowd of travelers waiting for five o'clock to strike and the Southwest Airlines staff to appear and check them in.

We'd spent the night in the motel because although there is a major airport a forty-five minutes' drive from Fiat, Southwest Airlines does not land there, nor does it depart therefrom;  for the cheap flights you have to drive three hours to Raleigh. So I'd booked this motel room for Epiphany and me and then made plans to spend the day before her departure with a friend from high school who lives in a town at the edge of the Research Triangle -- an area, I observe, whose economy seems to thrive in a way that the lumber-and-textile-based economy in our part of the state does not, quite, these days. There, the shopping centers along the highway aren't nearly the ghost towns that they are between, say, Fiat and Rutherfordton, where we went the other night to visit Amicus at Boy Scout Camp.

But I digress. As I say, I'd made these plans, and at the last minute I decided to bring Crispina along, too. Aelred and Helier were leaving early Saturday morning to fetch Amicus and assorted other boys from Scout Camp, a Y-Chromosome-stamped endeavor if ever there were one, and while they'd willingly have taken Crispina with them, I thought everyone might be happier if she came with me.

She was happier, I can tell you that. At my friend's house, she was loaded up with outgrown ballet costumes belonging to the teenaged daughter, and the twelve-year-old son, manfully swallowing his disappointment that I hadn't brought any guys for him to play with, not only entertained Crispina all afternoon, but sent her away with a large plastic talking robot, which is the new darling of her heart. All the way home in the car it was, "Would you like some tea?" Emergency on the waterfront! "A strawberry fruit snack?" Rescue winch deployed! The first few thousand times I heard the robot utter this phrase, I thought it was saying, Rescue wish deployed, which was sort of charming, I thought -- a robot version of prayer, almost.

Meanwhile -- or, well, between yesterday afternoon's visit, which already seems to have happened a century ago, and the drive home, which also feels now like an event of the dim and distant past -- we deployed Epiphany to her college program. Her bag checked, we wandered up and down the airport in an unsuccessful bid to find an open coffee stand;  of course it was really a bid to make time stand still, which also proved fruitless.

After a few minutes' stroll, during which the fruitlessness of the coffee search became all too apparent, I turned to Epiphany and remarked with great casualness, "Well, you might as well go on through security. Maybe there'll be coffee on the other side."

"Yep," she said.

Thereupon Crispina burst into tears. "Dooooooon't gooooooooo."

"I'll be home soon," said Epiphany. We hugged each other in a brief, businesslike fashion -- don't want to get all emotional, here, unlike some people -- and off she went. With Crispina, who was still swallowing down great sobs, I watched her show the security personnel her boarding pass and i.d. I watched her take off her belt -- metal buckle -- and her shoes and put her little baggie of toiletries in the tray alongside them. I saw her head and shoulders proceed along the line and through the metal detector, on the far side of which she paused to reconstitute her clothing.

"Goodbye! Have fun!" we called to her as she ascended the stairs on the far side. She turned and waved to us, then passed from our sight. Crispina started to cry again, until I suggested we go find something sticky and sweet for breakfast and comfort the robot, all alone in the back seat of the car under the urinous lights of the parking deck.

So we came home. In our absence, which felt a lot longer than it actually was, the boys had acquired a turtle. His name was Norman -- I guess it still is Norman -- and Aelred had rescued him from the middle of the highway en route either to or from the Boy Scout camp. Possibly Norman was fleeing one of the deserted shopping malls along that road, where I'm sure the earthworms are scarce. At any rate, Aelred had brought him home for Crispina to see before releasing him by the creek behind the old high-school gym, and when we got home, there he was, in a box on the back porch, glaring balefully up at us from his temporary lettuce-carpeted environment.

After getting up at 3:45, putting a child on the plane, and then driving three hours home, I felt like an afternoon nap. In fact, I felt so much like an afternoon nap that I started to look like one, too. In the course of this nap I had one of those strange half-waking dreams in which you're consciously thinking something, or at least you dream you're consciously thinking something. In this one, I was inspired to draw a cartoon;  it was a dream, I suppose, because in real life I don't draw all that well. The cartoon I drew featured a gigantic plastic robot with light-up eyes and extendable torso striding across a burning landscape. Sometimes when I looked at the drawing, however, the figure I'd drawn looked more like an enormous turtle. At any rate, it was a figure of massive destruction. The cartoon bore this caption:  "Nevertheless, it was what he did."

When I woke up for the second time today, that's what I was thinking about. I am thinking on it still.