So it's 8:30, Central Standard Time. I'm in a motel room in a small town at the geographic heart of the U.S.A., listening to rain hammer at the window. The last time I spent the night in this part of the country, the only room available at the Best Western was an upstairs room, and the lady behind the desk offered it to Aelred and me -- we were moving from Memphis to Salt Lake City, with all our belongings, including, at that moment, our car keys, locked in the back of the U-Haul truck -- in a spirit of dubiousness. It was storming out; did we really want to take our chances? We were too road-stoned just then to care whether we got blown away or not, and besides, we needed a telephone to call a locksmith. As it turned out, when Aelred called the one local listing in the yellow pages, the man had just died, so that Aelred spent some minutes apologizing profusely to the widow on the other end. I forget how we ended up getting our keys back, but we must have, because we're not still there. Or to put it another way, here I am in Kansas again.
I have had some very nice barbecue for dinner, and now I'm mulling over the offerings in the vending machine downstairs, more out of boredom than actual hunger. The best thing about this motel is that it has free wi-fi; otherwise, there's not much on. Epiphany, who accompanied me on this junket -- or, more accurately, whom I accompanied -- is spending the night in the freshman dorms of the local liberal-arts college, having a taste of campus life after dark on a wet Thursday night. I meanwhile am having a taste of it's really too early to go to bed, but there's nothing else to do.
And that's not a bad thing. Do not think that I complain. The solitude is not unpleasant on the whole. After a day of plane changes, it's nice to sit here in the mauve-carpeted quiet with nothing before me that has to be done, except maybe get some Grandma's Cookies out of the vending machine, because calories consumed in Kansas after 8 p.m. don't count.
There's an odd noise coming from somewhere out in the hall, a noise like several people trying to swim in the ice machine.
I think I may be too tired for cookies anyway. Nothing to do but go to bed is sounding better and better to me.
2 comments:
I've never been to Kansas and as silly as it sounds its on my bucket list. "Go To Kansas And Stand In A Wheat Field Just Before Harvest." Not that's what you're doing...there in your hotel room with the folks swimming in the ice machine down the hall. I just thought I'd share. *grin*
Well, you know, you ought to see as much of the world as you can in this life . . .
Seriously, it is very pretty here. The town we're in is a very archetypal midwestern town, a tidy grid of Victorian houses by the Missouri River. People are lovely and friendly, at least at the college my firstborn is visiting -- they've gone out of their way to be gracious. I'm not sure what I was expecting from this visit, but even in mizzling rain and November gray, it's been really nice.
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