Trans/plant/portation

We are vacationing this holiday season-come-semester break at Susanne’s parents house in the “southern thumb” of Michigan. Yes, when you ask a Michigander (it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it) where they’re from, they’ll hold up their hand and point. It’s actually pretty handy [sic]. Every state should look like a limb one could hold up and point to. “I live in the adrenal gland portion of the kidney,” say. Okay, maybe that’s not the best idea ever, especially given Manhattan’s geography.

Anyway, if they’re from somewhere in the vicinity of Detroit, the state’s most populous city, they may say something like “11 Mile,” referring to the regular spate of roads that run parallel to the north boundary, further and further to the top of the hand. Eminem made his 8 Mile movie, everyone already knows, about the area where the suburbs take over—but as far as I know, there are no plans for a “40 Mile” sequel, all about the drama of car parts factories on the outskirts of the dying automobile center. No wait, that was Roger and Me.

After a few days of meals at home, we descended on a local eatery, the Raiders Coney Island. By “we,” I mean me, Susanne, her mom, two brothers, sister-in-law, and their four kids, ranging in age from 2 to 17. It was a little Jon and Kate Plus 8 meets a Top Chef challenge—the elimination kind, not the simple quickfires, either. Taking up three booths in the small eatery, the waitress was a little overwhelmed.

Upon seeing customers who needed her service, she probably would have drawn a sharp intake of breath on a good day, but on this day she had no backup help, either, it being two days after Christmas and the other staff not having the same level of commitment to the family establishment that she did, since it was clearly her family’s establishment. But my immediate concern wasn’t for her ability to take our drink order, it was for the obvious extreme edema she had in her ankles. It was so bad I wasn’t sure how she’d managed to get her feet into her sneakers. My next worry was if her apparently chronic swelling had anything to do with the food in this place. Perhaps I could suck on a gratis lollypop and call that supper.

She slowly made her way to each table, starting with the ones who were already seated before we’d gotten there. Well, slowly isn’t really the right word. She was hurrying in a way that did little to increase her speed in any measurable fashion. Perhaps in an alternate universe we’d eaten already.

Finally she plunked down our menus, and the “raider” concept hit me. They had a knight on a horse, holding a spear, with a weiner at the end. This was the graphical fusion, I supposed, of the raider and Coney Island. Someone should tell the restaurant owners that Coney Island is about to be bulldozed into a suburban-like subdevelopment a la the Goonies. Only instead of pirate treasure maps we have the near-total collapse of the global economy. That’ll slow ’em down. The raider, however, was smiling, so excited about the opportunity for a hot dog that he was obliquely unaware of the doom awaiting the old amusement park.

“Hey, isn’t that the mascot for your old high school,” I asked Susanne. She nodded. “Well, kind of. The real mascot looked more serious.” She paused.

“And there’s no hot dog in the real logo,” she added, just in case I leave this experience wondering why the superintendent of schools thinks it’s okay for the local high school to model such poor food choices to its impressionable students.

I appreciated that they hadn’t stolen the licensed image from the high school, even as they were clearly looking to it as their reference point. I later learned that they regularly give money to the high school, so I suppose they should go ahead an name themselves after the mascot—they’ve earned it.

“So was your school color orange,” I asked, looking at the menu cover. I went to Syracuse University for college, so I’m familiar with the futility of trying to work school-licensed clothes into one’s general wardrobe.

“Orange and black,” she said, knowing full well I’d be shocked. They were always ready for Halloween, I guess.

“My high school was brown and gold,” I said, “so I never thought I’d hear of worse colors than that.” I made famous a short story from my graduation, when one of the girls asked me why the women wore white graduation caps and gowns instead of gold, since the men were wearing chocolate brown, to which I’d remarked, “because they don’t want it to look like a lot of shit and piss out there.”

There is no restaurant, nice or not, in Hamilton, New Jersey, that has my old high school logo on it. Just saying.

The menu was a strange blend of Greek culinary tradition, pub fare, and Johnny Rockets diner food. I still don’t see my beloved pizzaburger outside New Jersey, but I won’t hold it against them. I tried to order the chicken kabobs.

“We don’t have those made up yet,” the salt-retaining waitress told me, as if any minute now, chicken kabobs would be good to go. “But this other chicken meal is the same thing, just not cut up.”

Wondering why cutting the chicken into smaller pieces would mean it would somehow take longer to cook, I saw that this other dinner also came smothered in green peppers, mushrooms, and provolone cheese, most of which are not to be found on Greek-style kabobs. So okay, I went with that, with a little hesitation about when any of this was going to take to arrive at our tables. Every so often she would call out to her mother for help, and I started to wonder if she wasn’t talking to a ghost or an imaginary friend. But finally, Mom showed up, agreeing to help make the four smoothies and milkshakes the kids had ordered. One look at the mother and I was certain their was some family illness with water retention going on here. Why had no one told them to seek medical help for their obvious swelling problems?

The cooks in the back were doing their best impressions of Wilson from Home Improvement, so I couldn’t analyze whether the male members of the family were afflicted with the same disease, but they put the food up on the counter when it was ready and voila, cheese and fungus-covered chicken was at my table. Susanne and I had finished an impromptu game of dots, with her finding the one and two box spots and me mis-selecting a long chain of 16 boxes for her to label. Damn dots game—you always make me pay for slow diner service by showing me what an awful player I am. Maybe I shouldn’t carry a pen with me wherever I go.

Half our orders were wrong—the mother made milkshakes instead of slurpies, which, 50 minutes after walking in, we were happy to drink anyway. Yes, they needed more serving staff. The food was fine though, and cheap, and finally we were back in the car, heading through the Christmas Week night and jazzed up to play some head-to-head solitaire. Maybe, I thought, we should just cook at home.

The lack of proximity between purchasing airline tickets and actually getting onto an airplane has not served us well this year. Susanne, in early October, had her face buried in her laptop screen. “What do you think about this flight,” she asked, her eyes mere inches from the glowing pixels, “it’s a really good price.”

“How good,” I asked, leaning over. “Oh, that is good.”

“But it’s a red eye,” she said.

“But the price,” I said.

Abstractly, I understood that it was a middle-of-the-night flight. I do, after all, have a very successful track record with surviving the middle of the night, even if I’m usually asleep for it.

“It’s three legs,” she said, sounding less confident.

I responded by ignoring her fears. “It’s always at least two, hon,” I said, a little too cheerfully. She should have understood right then that I was just blinded by my thriftiness and rethought our approach. But perhaps Susanne was seeing little stars of savings, too.

We sent our credit card numbers through the information superhighway and were rewarded with an email confirming we had just purchased our way to visiting friends and family for the holidays. And then went about our daily routine, forgetting all about it.

And then we were driving, in late December, to the airport. We had an 8 o’clock fight to Seattle, a multi-hour layover, and then a midnight flight to Minneapolis, followed by another couple of hours in that airport, and then a morning flight to Detroit.

What a horrible itinerary! Who had done this to us?

We had. We had done this to ourselves.

We drove by the bad broccoli plant, which for its part sent us an intense putrid odor as a parting shot for departing Walla Walla. Every time we’ve left before, the city has done some kind of stick-its-tendrils-into-us to slow us down. What would it be this time, I wondered, trying not to breathe as I drove past the paper mill. It just loved us so much it wanted to stay in our nostrils.

On the first plane, the flight attendant told us happily that we’d be making a stop in Yakima on our way to Seattle. This meant we were splitting the trip into two 25-minute segments. Never going about 15,000 feet, we stopped like a bus at the Yakima airport and five people joined our flight. About ten minutes away from Seattle, the worst stench of gastrointestinal distress invaded my olfactory nerves. I looked at Susanne and mouthed, “was that you?”

She shook her head no emphatically. We tried to breathe as little as we could, having just practiced this outside the paper mill. The flight attendant empathized with us, as she was also stuck at the very back of the plane with us and the killer fart. As we rolled into the gate, they put two staircases up to the fuselage, and the flight attendant, knowing our plight, told us we could just take the one in the back, two feet behind our seats. We walked the length of the terminal toward our next gate. Having cleared our heads, our stomachs started rumbling, and we decided to get dinner.

The waiter asked what we wanted. As we were in a tap house and pub, we each ordered a wheat beer. He plunked them down on the table, announcing last call.

“When do you close,” I asked.

“In 30 minutes,” he said.

We drank our beers and ate our greasy food quickly, rushing off to the shuttle train to our next terminal and departure gate. I could feel the reuben sloshing around in my tipsy stomach, but we had some time to relax before the red eye. The Seattle airport has free wifi, which seems nice until one notices that it has next to no power outlets. What teases. We wandered around looking for a free outlet, to no avail. And the people who had already juiced up weren’t offering to unplug, even for a little while. This made me wonder if:

1. everyone had terrible laptop batteries that wouldn’t hold a charge

2. they hated Christmas and were hogging the electricity just to be nasty

3. they were inattentive, oblivious Northwesterners

So we booted up my laptop, sharing it between us and hoping to model good behavior for all of the manners-impaired strangers in the terminal. Somehow I think it didn’t make any difference.

We piled on to the red eye, hoping for a smooth enough, unoffensively smelling enough flight that we could catch some sleep before getting into the Twin Cities. Susanne conked out on my shoulder quickly, but I have trouble staying asleep while sitting up, so I watched the people around me slumber instead, some snoring, some with their jaws hanging open while doing so. And I realized that it’s no wonder why people eat a good number of bugs over the years.

Landing after the red eye, we were somewhat dismayed to discover we still weren’t there yet.

Our next gate was a little ways down from a Caribou Coffee. A family of three each had a drink from there, and they looked so happy, like a live advertisement for the wonderful things coffee can do for you, too. Have an impressive blonde son and snappily dressed trophy wife! Enjoy endless energy and increase your income potential with our frozen vanilla frappuccinos!

“I’m going to get some coffee,” said Susanne, standing up. “Would you like anything?”

I stared at the happy people. Happy people. I wanted to go to there. I nodded at her.

“Okay, what would you like?”

My voice, exhausted, came out in a whisper.

“A frosty mcfrosterson,” I said.

“A what?”

I pointed at the 4-year-old toe head. “Mocha,” I squeaked.

“Is there anything else you want, like some caramel flavor or hazelnut?”

Why was she making this so difficult? I said frosty mcfrosterson! Just understand what I want! I’m perfectly clear!

That was what I thought. But what I said was:

“Mocha!”

“Okay,” she said, now talking to me as if I were only 4. “Do you want anything to eat?”

I shook my head no.

She came back a really long time later that equaled something like 7 minutes, and I sucked back my frozen mocha in a few gulps. The caffeine hit me like a Boxing Day tsunami. Maybe that’s exaggerating and trivializing. Okay, it hit me like really bad flatulence, except it was so good. And not odiferous in any way. I was suddenly, powerfully awake.

I typed things, I texted people. I was online and sending status updates to anyone who cared. In the very narrow band of things that could be remotely productive while sitting in an airport waiting to catch one’s third flight in 12 hours, I was a king of getting shit done.

Susanne seemed to be buzzing, too. She asked if she should get us a bagel and cream cheese. That sounded like a terrific idea! Sure! Get us 14 bagels!

She found some organic-pretends-to-be-French bakery and got us a hemp bagel. I had no idea people ate hemp. Wasn’t it reserved for scratchy rope and reusable shopping bags? Would we get high from eating this?

We did not get high, which was good, given that we were already loopy. But I did discover that hemp seeds can get caught pretty easily between one’s teeth. Good life experience to note, I guess.

Finally, at long last, we were on our last flight. Only two hours and forty-eight minutes to Detroit. The flight was uneventful.

Our bags were not on the belt. I lined up in a long queue for lost luggage, not confident that I could explain what had happened with any degree of clarity, or words, even. Probably I would just wave my arms a lot and point to my claim tag bar codes, and hope that would suffice for them. I was a raving mad man, a very tired raving mad man. So maybe I wasn’t raving. I was a raved, farted on, ear-drum deafened, sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, hemp-eating mad man.

Three people before I reached the front of the line Susanne tapped me on the shoulder and told me she’d found her bag on one random luggage belt and mine on another. I trudged out to the car, brought thankfully by her cousin and husband, who came with the car as part of a package driving deal, and didn’t ask how our bags wound up on the opposite end of the baggage claim area. I didn’t care anymore.

We rode 90 minutes to Susanne’s parents’ house, had a cup of tea, and took a 3-hour nap. We had crossed 17 hours, three flights, four airports, one train, two commutes, one really bad cheese cutting incident, two bad meals, one hurried pint of hefeweisen, and three increasingly inarticulate conversations. We woke up at 5:30pm Eastern time, which felt like 2:30 to us, kind of, since I think I never actually saw the sun the whole day, and really, I didn’t even know what day it was anymore.

But hell, it only cost us $525 a ticket.

Back at the beginning of the year, I posted 5 predictions for 2009. I’ll just note that I was unequivocally correct on numbers 1 and 5. Number 4 is kind of right, in that I think Mrs. Obama has been putting herself out there as a champion for children, especially children of color and in the working class. She’s not sticking to uncontroversial events like book expos on the Mall (much as I appreciated having the chance to get my Sandman #1 signed by Neil Gaiman himself, so thank you, Laura). I still think Jon Stewart might leave the Daily Show, since there are other big gaps in the late night time slots now—can anyone argue that 5 nights of Jay Leno at 10 o’clock aren’t 5 nights too many? As for number 3, well, I think the health care bill in Congress is testimony to the forces against abortion, but I wouldn’t call them quiet, and I wouldn’t say they rise—yet—to the level of vitriol we’ve seen against getting gay married.

What I absolutely failed to understand last January was how ridiculously insane and ludicrous everything would get. It was one thing to blame sub-prime borrowers for the housing market failure. Who doesn’t like to pick on people with bad credit, after all? But really, death panels? “You lie!” shouted in the chamber during the freaking State of the Nation address? The entire Fox News staff schlocking gold as an investment for the masses? Hannity’s time-lapse magic to exaggerate the tea baggers’ crowds at a rally in DC? And hell, the Tea Baggers? I couldn’t dream this crap up!

Or could I? Okay, I’ll take a stab at it. I’ll try and springboard off of some of the more outlandish headlines from 2009. Feel free to chime in with your own flash forwarding stories for next year.

1. Glenn Beck, Tom O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh officially begin a new third political party, called the Gold Fox Party getting Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney to agree to run again in 2012. All kinds of donations come in, most in the form of gold, which drives the Federal Election Commission nuts as the price of gold keeps climbing and putting donors over the maximum donation limit. After 6 months, the party collapses when Glenn and Rush are discovered receiving kickbacks and prescription painkillers from a laid-off worker of ACORN.

2. Sarah Palin’s own political career is finally dismantled when the public learns that Trig is the offspring of her and Levi Johnson, Bristol’s now-ex-boyfriend.

3. The US media goes crazy with tons of stories about the new “green economy,” even though the GDP is only up 0.4 percent and there’s only one new factory for producing solar panels that because of NAFTA, has opened in Mexico. The Mexican government is dismayed to find out that all of the physical barriers we’ve erected in the last 5 years aren’t any good at keeping illegal US citizens out of Mexico.

4. An independent study comes out revealing that 72.4 percent of people previously detained at Gitmo know nothing about al Qaeda’s operations from 2001, much less anything that could help counter-terrorism officials now. They have, however, secretly formed a support group with tips on making their prison lives better, including  how to make a lovely bisque from ephemera, though they can’t find any in the middle of Illinois. They turn to Martha Stewart for advice on working with dandelion greens.

5. The CEOs of AIG, JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers, and Countrywide Mortgage take their latest year salaries, pool them together, and buy an island in the Carribean, setting up a new government with so many tax shelters for the rich that they make a fortune in taking other people’s money at their new banks. They also send out a message to Roman Polanski that he should find a way to get out of Switzerland and come to Moneytopia so that he can direct a film about their story. It wins 8 Golden Globes and 2 Academy Awards and is hailed by critics as an “opus of epochal storytelling, delivered by the master storyteller himself.”

I say that I lived in DC for 11 years, but really, about half of that time I lived just across the River Potomac in Arlington, Virginia. The southern part of the city was littered with G.I. Bill-era condominiums, depressing in their seemingly unending beige-ness, save the small rectangular swatches of orange, avocado green, or chocolate brown that were strategically affixed to the outside plaster walls. Row upon row of chunky modern buildings stymied many a newcomer who was driving in for some party or other, and who would likely mention, at some point in the evening and against their better judgment, that the roads were confusing. This was really a standby phrase for, “This place sucks,” or “How the hell can you live here,” two questions I heard with some frequency from the people who were closer to me.

Commuting didn’t seem that hard, after all, it was only a bus, generally on time, to the Pentagon Metro station, and then either a 40-minute ride if you took the Blue Line or a 25-minute ride if you caught the Yellow Line, to the Foggy Bottom Metro station, which then gave way to a 10-minute walk. Of course you could forgo the Blue Line train and hope the next one coming was a Yellow Line, but most folks had the same stratergy, and it was challenging to get oneself on the car, as the platform would have swelled with Blue Line eschewing people.

Okay, okay, commuting sucked. At some point Metro installed display screens in all of the stations that broadcast when the next trains would be arriving and which lines they were on. It took away some of the confusion, and a modicum of the stress. Now one didn’t have to hurl themselves into a train car so much as stand right on the edge of the track and sneak their way onto the car. This did draw the risk that the driver, seeing people too close to the precipice, would honk the horn, which meant that one was startled and had to cling onto the next neurotic to avoid accidentally falling onto the tracks. And it did occur to me that though I feared not making a train, I never actually saw anyone who wanted on a train not make it, unless they hadn’t reached the platform by the time the train had pulled in. Those drivers didn’t wait around for the sun to rise.

So living in Virginia, I didn’t really feel any less of a city person, because Arlington was about as urban as DC. With some major differences.

DC didn’t have chain restaurants. Not a one that I could think of. Now then, for purposes of this discussion, we’re not talking $5 Foot Long Subway or Wendy’s, although both of them serve things that sometimes resemble food. We’re talking sit down, has a menu you can hold, has waitstaff service restaurant. There are no Ruby Tuesday’s in the District of Columbia. There is a TGIFriday’s, in the aforementioned Foggy Bottom (which is one of the most fun to say places ever, right after Virginville, PA), but other than that, the only real chain entities are the ones that specifically cater to large groups, like Buco di Beppi and The Cheesecake Factory, the latter of which is so close to the Maryland border that it barely counts as “in” the District. For the most part, DC has independent, one-of-a-kind restaurants, which I’ve always loved about the place.

Not all the residents feel this way, however. I was shocked when I heard a friend ask if, when we were planning a dinner date, please, could we maybe possibly go to the Olive Garden in Virginia? The what? The place with the never ending bowl of limp overdressed salad and spongy baguettes? Where you can practically still see the tin foil on the entrees from where they peeled off the top of the frozen dinner? Surely they were jesting.

They were dead serious. After that first terrifying request, I was more jaded to the rest, but faithfully, I would honor my friends’ wishes because I was sure they’d honor mine when I wanted to partake of Ella’s wood fired pizza, pick through a still-hot plate of real paella at my favorite tapas bar, or break through steamed crabs at Eat First in Chinatown. Hindsight shows that I was the more flexible among most of my friends, but I always thought it was amazing that with such good, affordable options in the city they wanted to hop into my SUV and get some pre-cooked crap at Ruby’s or worse, Old Country Buffet. After eating there a couple of times, I begged not to have to go there anymore. That stuff was just toxic to me. I think I’ve had nightmares about their pink-frosted sponge cake and overcooked buffalo wings.

Here in Walla Walla, we don’t have any chain restaurants. In the next town over there’s an Applebee’s, which I’ve never been to, and probably never will, even if I wind up living here for 20 years. (Note to the universe: that is not your cue to get me to live here for 20 years, okay? Thank you.)

But nobody, and I mean nobody, has suggested I eat there, or said anything approximating a request to go there for some patty melt action. I’m just disappointed that if we have to have a chain restaurant, it couldn’t be a Friendly’s. I feel like Wallyworld would benefit hugely from the massive pile of fried clam strips and overflowing peanut butter cup sundae. Okay, maybe not in the same meal. But they don’t know what they’re missing.

So I’m wondering why the urban crowd and not the rural folks want these establishments as a dining option. Maybe the cityfolk were once suburbanites. Thus they find some level of comfort in say, thinking they know what to expect in terms of the culinary fare. Or being on what they consider the pedestal of city glitterati entitles them to “slum it” with the 4-person family set at the local bedroom community’s Chili’s. After all, nothing says “mall experience” more than a little P.F. Chang’s. And the only mall in DC is the blocks-long lawn between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol. I’ve actually seen tweens grumble to their parents, all of them tourists, upset that the District mall isn’t what they had in mind. Those are shopping malls, children. This is why your teachers want you to have reading comprehension.

Walla Wallans are an adaptable, resourceful lot. You want Indian cuisine? Make friends with Shampa and her family and get an invite for dal and lamb curry. (I can attest it is very good.) Or buy a cookbook and spend some money ordering ingredients online. Or, go to Trader Joe’s 4 hours away and buy 63 of the vacuum packed lentil and chick pea side dishes for use over the long winter, because spicy lentils are like summer fruit around here.

If you want Thai, well, there are two, count em, two, Thai restaurants. One was just redesigned after the landlord and divorcing owners had a falling out, but after all the brou ha ha, there appears to be nothing different about the new place, even with the new owner. I hear they replaced the chairs. Red vinyl, make way for . . . black vinyl!

The other Thai restaurant is in the next town over. An extreme amount of kitch went into the decor, which showcases a couple of kinds of linoleum flooring, some discolored tableclothes set protectively under plexiglass, a whole host of plastic sculpture designed to inform patrons about the wonders of Thailand, and many mismatched Asian-inspired drawings on the wall. It is owned and run by a white man and his Thai bride, the former of whom runs the front of the house, and the latter of whom does the cooking. When they’re having a bad night together her food gets increasingly spicy, which is perhaps her strategy for getting out of the restaurant business. A culinary cry for help, as it were. But really this tendency means two things:

1. get there early

2. really early, as they close at 8PM.

Another saying around town is “Never eat Chinese food in Walla Walla if you can help it.” No really, that’s a saying around town. While Susanne’s brother was a fan of a local Chinese restaurant, we didn’t find it particularly inspiring. I hate when food only can remind you of better food you’re not currently eating. That’s this place. Milk toast, mediocre, not gut-or-anus-clenching bad, but just kind of bland and not worth the money you just spent on it. There’s also an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet, but I’ve already admitted to my buffet misgivings. By the way, Walla Walla does have an American/Italian all-you-can-eat buffet; one day when we didn’t realize what it was (we were thinking they had pizza), we walked in and were astounded to see a warning sign at the front door, which read:

THIS ESTABLISHMENT USES SULFIDES FOR PRESERVATIVES. ASK YOUR WAITER FOR INFORMATION IF YOU HAVE ALLERGIES.

Oh, waiter, can you tell me which of these buffet items will kill me?

We turned around and left. And craving pizza.

Susanne and I visited our friend in the hospital last week, thinking that she wouldn’t yet be able to talk, as her cancer surgery was in the neighborhood of her neck. I can imagine few people more garrulous than me, which she is, so it must have been difficult for her, relying only on a small white board, looking something like Tim Russert on Election Day in 2000. Only in this case, it’s to ask “When can I get out of here,” and not to suddenly realize the future of the country is “Too close to call.”

My plan was to walk in her room and announce that she could speak up if she didn’t want a visit, give her .2 seconds to chirp, and then say, “Okay, great, so I had a few stories to share with you…”

As it was, she was already sitting up and speaking, to her surgeon. I looked at the older, chubby man with a halo of white hair on his head and the smart Kenneth Cole pinstriped shirt, and realized I knew him from somewhere. But where? Quickly, my brain flicked through Walla Walla experiences like a coke addict with a Fischer-Price Viewmaster. Not the pharmacy. Not my outpatient knee surgery. Not the coffee shop. Not a winery. Not the Bi-Mart. Who was this guy?

They were finishing up their conversation about her prognosis. I stood out in the hall, too focused on placing him than eavesdropping, although the tone they shared indicated that things were better than expected. It occurred to me that I had shared something vaguely intimate with him—which was weird, of course, given the whole married to Susanne thing. I asked her if she remembered him from anywhere, and she shook her head in that way she has when she realizes, again, that I am something of a loon. I would just have to put my sudden fascination aside and think about it later.

He acknowledged us on his way out the door and I gave him one last stare, begging my synapses to at least pretend to give a crap that they were in my brain for my benefit, not theirs. My synapses, absences of material that they are, scoffed at me. Screw those uppity dendrites, they synapted at me. My dendrites, meanwhile, just shrugged as if none of this brain communication was their responsibility.

We sat down and she smiled at us, firecracker that she is. A long red scar ran the width of her neck and I had a memory I’d forgotten previously of when I’d had a very swollen underchin after falling off my bike when I was 7. So apparently something was going on upstairs in my head after all.

She looked at me and said, gravelly voiced, “I’ve been telling everyone about what you said to me 6 weeks ago. You told me I could handle anything.”

Okay, that’s how I remember it. What I had actually said, which our friend recalled as well, was that I’d said, “Mary, you could be a conjoined twin and you would handle it just fine. You could handle anything.”

“I do believe in serendipity,” she said, looking at me intensely. “You said the right words to me at the perfect moment, so thank you.”

Jeez, I was just blathering on, but I was glad she found such meaning in them. I blinked back tears.

Ever the talker, she started launching into various thoughts and opinions, and Susanne and I tried to fill in the space between her words with our own, so she wouldn’t tire herself out. But a couple of days in the CICU, and the old professor wanted to make up for lost time. She wanted to know, it seemed, everything that had happened on the face of the planet in the last 48 hours. To me, things seemed pretty stuck—health care still being bandied about in Washington, Tiger groping for some relief from his PR nightmare—

“Oh, I know! What was he thinking? Can you even believe it?”

“Well,” I said, adding my only “news” about the event to the conversation, “I read that his wife has adjusted the prenup agreement.”

“She’s a smart one,” Mary said, “good for her!”

We devolved into a conversation about reality television and the stars who populate its universe, and Mary mentioned the White House party crashers. Oh good, I thought, I can tell her my stories about their vineyard so she won’t have to talk. I told her my stories, speaking more quickly than I usually do because I was afraid she’d jump in and start chattering. Even Susanne cut me off a couple of times, lest a nanosecond of silence inspire her to start talking.

“I wonder if there isn’t a hierarchy of reality tv personalities,” I mused.

“How do you mean,” asked Mary.

I explained. At the top are the celebrities who have deigned to be the host of some reality show, probably a competition of some kind. You’ve got your reality tv stars, people who at any given moment, are the rage of some show or other. Then you have the reality tv stars of lesser-watched shows, or spin-off shows. Then there are the has beens whose moment has passed recently, and on their heels, the ones who were like, on The Real World eight years ago. Then there are the reality tv figures who weren’t ever really popular, or who were on awful, short-lived shows like The Mole. And now we see there are even the rejects from the reality television world, like the balloon boy parents or the White House party crashers. So it goes something like:

Heidi Klum (Project Runway), Padma (Top Chef)

Jeff Lewis (Flipping Out) Stacy London (What Not to Wear)

Lauri Waring (Real Housewives of Orange County)

Danielle Staub (Real Housewives of New Jersey)

John Gosselin (Jon and Kate Plus Eight)

Diane Ogden (Survivor, season 3)

Valerie Penso (Temptation Island)

Balloon Boy parents

And all of these are still above someone like Brian Bonsall, former child actor who got arrested yet again last week, although I’m not sure I can articulate why.

“I think there’s a study in there somewhere,” Mary said, and we laughed.

All throughout our discussion she kept touching the lower half of her face, presumably to see if it was still attached. It does give one the illusion that one’s head is much, much larger than it is when you can only feel it from the outside and not from within itself. I knew we’d tired her out, so we made our departure, leaving her with a copy of my memoir, since we’d heard she had exhausted her reading material. She nearly yanked it out of my hands, so I’m looking forward to her comments.

I drifted off to sleep that night and realized I’d gone to see that doctor when my hearing was getting bad, about 8 weeks ago. He’d found some ear wax stuck against my eardrum, and had sucked it out with the smallest vacuum tube I’d ever seen.

I’d call that vaguely intimate.

Last year Susanne and I went to observe the local Holiday parade—oh heck, it’s Walla Walla, we don’t need to pretend to be PC. Or rather, calling it a “holiday parade” is really a misnomer, because in fact it’s a Christmas parade. Yes, Christmas. As in, not Kwanzaa, not solstice, not any of the Jewish High Holidays, and certainly, most definitely, how could you even suggest it, anything Arabic. Last year, at least, the floats were about two thirds Christian church groups and denominations, one third the Elks Club and dog rescues. So for those of you doing the math, yes, there were six floats. Okay, there were a few more, but the whole event was over in 10 minutes. And each float was really intense, with lots of waving, small children—the one who got my “Best Waver” award was tween girl who gesticulated somewhere between Queen Elizabeth II and Maddona’s “strike a pose” vogue choreography. Seriously, the girl had it down. This year there were more floats, no MiniCooper brigade, although there were a slew of 60s and 70s-era muscle cars, lots more church groups, and a few fire trucks decked out in white lights, with Santa atop the ladder, which was pretty freaking cool, if you ask me. I was on a ladder truck once. I was 4, with my preschool class, and it was so exciting I nearly peed all over the vehicle. Something about a red, plastic firefighter’s helmet was just too much for me. Maybe that’s why I went into computers.

Anyway, there’s nothing really wrong with church groups per se, just that one gets  a little tired, whilst standing on the sidewalk in the 6pm pitch darkness, fending off folks who are walking with the floats and handing out scripture, lest one’s soul take a detour to that fire and brimstone place at the end of one’s life. That’s presumptive. To my mind, if I am interested in your church, I’ll check it out all on my own. My grandmother moved a lot with her farmer/carpenter husband, and she practically interviewed the pastors of competing churches in each new town to see which one would best reflect her family’s viewpoint. Obviously not a shrinking violet, my grandmother, and I want to applaud her initiative to basically make churches compete against each other. I’d like to see a sack race, actually, with a Ryrie Study Bible at the goal line, maybe.

But really, it’s just a little too exclusionary for me. People should feel excitement to see a town’s parade, not feel alienated by it. I’m sure it’s not their intention; it’s just a reflection of the fact that for 36,000 residents, Walla Walla has a lot of churches. DC certainly had its houses of prayer as well—drive down 16th Street NW into Maryland (which is also the President’s ground escape route, by the way) and you will count more than 25 churches and synagogues, as well as other buildings for less mainstream-in-America faiths, like Baha’i, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Walla Walla, a small group of Quakers meets in the faculty lounge of a Whitman College building because there aren’t enough of them to warrant building a Friend’s House. There is a synagogue on Alder Street, at which I’ve never seen a person coming or going. Maybe the congregants take secret tunnels in and out of it.

My intention isn’t to gripe about Christians. I was raised Catholic (I can hear the booing and hissing), and it imparted a lot of valuable lessons and beliefs I hold dear to this day. Don’t break your chalk in anger. Always put the period inside the quote marks, always, always, ALWAYS. No talking during announcements. You will never know everything, so don’t even try. Turn the other cheek, always, always, always. The good in life that you do counts, so do some good, you rug rat. Forgive the sinner, hate the sin.

This last life lesson was highlighted my senior year of parochial high school, in religion class. Religion class for seniors was all about how to have “The Catholic Marriage,” which, now that I think of it, was also a bit presumptive, if not at least unintentionally pressuring us to get married right away. We were mostly 17, after all. At any rate, our teacher, Sister Doretta, who I gather had never actually participated in Catholic Marriage, was leading discussion that spring, which must have been tough. I mean, I felt no need to continue the last month of class—I’d already selected my college and was marking big red Xs on my calendar as a personal countdown to getting to leave New Jersey. So it was only with one ear that I heard her talk about one tiny little paragraph at the end of the workbook (don’t even ask what our workbook practices were about) on homosexuality. And then she had my attention, because the official stance didn’t make sense to me.

17-year-old Me: Wait a minute, Sr. Doretta. It’s not being gay, it’s the behavior the Church opposes?

Sr. Doretta: Yes, exactly.

17YOM: Okay, okay. So you can be gay, you just can’t do anything?

Sr. Doretta: Well, right. It’s the sin, not the person.

17YOM: Wait, wait, wait. They could be gay, as long as they’re celibate?

Sr. Doretta: (sounding exasperated) Yes, child.

17YOM: Well, then they might as well be clergy!

Out of the mouths of babes. I wonder what she told the other sisters in the nunnery at supper that night.

Sr. Doretta: So this smart ass in class today figured out that gay people can be clergy.

Sr. Barbara: (finishing a sip of water from a crystalline challis) Oh, dear.

Sr. Cornelius: Let me guess. (chews slowly) The Maroon kid.

Sr. Doretta: You are a wise woman, Sister Cornelius.

Sr. Cornelius: (cutting into her roast lamb) Please. I’ve got that character for homeroom. Always talking during announcements.

If there were a float of nuns at the Walla Walla parade, I’d have to burst into laughter. Maybe I just like my religious figures to come with a jaundiced eye, instead of a 4-color, glossy cardstock notice that I too could be a fervent follower of Christ. Maybe I prefer being a fatass follower instead. Maybe, just maybe, I think my work for the Lord is by making sure I witness to everyone that they should always always always put the period inside the quote marks.

As it is, I’m glad people can be spiritual however they want, as long as they respect my ability to do that as well. As for the Walla Walla Christmas parade, I greatly enjoyed the guy riding his snowmobile on skateboards, and the grandfather who pulled his granddaughter behind his tractor that had so recently been used for field work that it left little bits of wheat behind in the street.

I was a bit concerned for the people who kept dashing across the street, looking for a better view, but I quickly realized they were more than capable of clearing the road before the vehicles traveling 8 miles an hour got anywhere near them. Every so often someone driving a pickup truck would get to the end of a side street, totally befuddled that there was some kind of event going on, and then you could see a light appear over their head as they realized that they had in fact, driven around a detour sign. So that’s what that orange thing was, they’d appear to think, scratching their heads.

The parade this year was much longer, and we were chilled to the bone by the end of it, having only moved enough to keep up with the bystanders who insisted on creeping into the road. These people needed the New York City police barricades, lest they begin attacking the parade floats like joyous zombies. If the parade had gone on much longer the trucks would have only had about 4 feet of street left, the rate we were all crouching in on them.

We walked back home, our legs frozen but still willing to ambulate so that we could reach warmth. Susanne poured a few chocolate martinis and I drew a fire, and I realized I am a fervent follower of Holidays. What a nice distraction from awful weather.

Susanne and I got some pretty bad news last night about a colleague of hers who is ill. She’d been having a sore throat for a few weeks, and went to see her doctor. Out here in Walla Walla there seem to be something like 3.8 doctors for every regular person, so perhaps she could have just passed one on the way to the actual medical center, but they don’t exactly walk around with floating neon signs over their heads proclaiming “Random Health Care Service Here, Cheap.” In fact, thinking about it, that was one of the things that still makes me mad about all that time spent watching Electric Company—I never would get to make orange letters appear over my head as I pronounced words. Such false advertising.

So the doctor sent her to an ear, nose, and throat doctor, who sent her to an oncologist, who scheduled a surgery for next week. I don’t know a heck of a lot about cancer, but I do know that when a relative of mine came down with prostate cancer, the physician said it was okay to wait a few months so he could finish a project. This is not that kind of scenario.

A couple of months ago this lady and I were at a potluck dinner of Susanne’s colleagues, so for the non-faculty such as myself, it’s a little bit of navigating around insider gossip and attempting to bring the conversation away from academics to something more average, without looking like an anti-intellectual Neanderthal. Happily, she and I landed on the topic of Flipping Out, the Bravo reality show about a Califnornia designer with OCD-like perfectionism. He’s nearly impossible to work for, likes his employees to be attractive and subservient, but he has a strong ribbon of compassion that ensures his humanness. It’s also fun to watch the people around him learn how to manage him, and then one realizes that while unorthodox, these are still mutually beneficial relationships with a big dash of absurd just to round out the interpersonal interest.

It’s hard to describe, but this connoisseur of garbage television is Grandmother Incarnate. If you were to take grandmothers everywhere and exaggerate them—warbly voice, prone to high highs and grumbly lows, include the dottiness that comes with no longer giving a shit what anyone thinks of you, and throw in some excessive levels of energy, you’d have her, all in a 4-foot, 10-inch frame. This woman stands on the desks in the front of her classrooms to give lectures. And is not afraid to dance to get her point across.

She was dismayed about Jeff Lewis, who had found out, in the course of this last season, that his best friend of many years had stolen construction/design work from him and denied it, vehemently. So over dinner conversation she remarked to me, her decibel range approximating that of 20 3-year-olds who’ve just had some good measure of processed sugar:

“Oh, I just can’t believe what happened to that poor Jeff Lewis! It’s so sad!” This was pronounced a bit more flaccidly, like this:

“OOOOOOOOh, oi just can’t beLEEEVE what HAAppened to that POOOOOOR Jeffff LOOOOis! It’s SOOOOO SAD!”

We agreed that we needed to catch up later after the reunion show, which is how Bravo ekes out a few more bucks in revenue without actually having a full camera crew, as one interviewer, who seems to have been trained at the Entertainment Tonight School of Broadcasting, talks to everyone who appeared in the previous season. Or at least the ones who were contractually bound to appear.

That conversation tabled, we moved on to other discussion points, and somehow it came up that I’d once been a patient at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia when I was, obviously, a child. Actually, I was 16. It was January, 1987. I was there for a neurological issue (yes, I’ve heard all the jokes), missing my junior year midterms as I spent a week recuperating. On the floor with me were two conjoined twins, later made famous on TLC, attached at the tops of their heads. One was significantly larger than the other, but they were both playing chess against each other, over by the nurses’s station, so being different sizes didn’t seem to intellectually advantage one over the other. Unless, I guess, someone was throwing a lot of games. If I had to spend every waking moment with another person I might do something like that.

Anyway, I’d had an IV for a few days to contend with, and I got sick of dragging it around every time I left the bed. One evening my Dad and I were taking a walk around the floor, shortly after the IV had come out. He asked me how I was doing. We passed the twins.

“At least I’m not attached to anything,” I said, to my own horror as I thought about the context. He patted my shoulder to suggest I wasn’t going to hell for my faux pas. “I wonder if they get along,” he said.

According to TLC, they get along great.

I’m not sure why this story came up during dinner with this older colleague, but my point about it at the time was that you know, everyone has something to contend with, and you just decide you have to handle it and get through it. I could be attached at the head to a smaller me who has to keep dealing with my twin’s annoying Reti opening on a daily basis. Or I could be in a small town, unable to sort through what to make of myself here, absent old friends and sans any kind of substantial income potential. As my niece said when she was 4, one disappointing Christmas, “You get what you get and you love it.” Young and innocent aside, she was explaining why her older sister should not covet the wood puzzle not given to her, so she wasn’t exactly free of ulterior motives. But whatever, it’s still a good line.

When the doctor gave her a diagnosis and course of treatment, she started thinking about our conversation, apparently, and has taken the “you just handle it” as a mantra. It seems that I should write a card for her, tell her something funny, since she appreciates a belly laugh and is such a tiny fireball of humor. I wish I could make cancer funny, but I’m failing. I find a lot of things funny—doctors and hospitals, for sure. Human bodies are funny; how else to explain ear wax and tongue structure? Not uh, not ear wax and tongue structure at the same time, of course. Just in general.

But there’s something about cancer that is just plain harrowing. Cells out of control, cells on a rampage with a maniacal streak toward body domination. Something as tiny as the nail on my little finger can throw any of my organs into shock enough that they stop working, abjectly relinquishing their duties to filter my blood, or let my brain know where my limbs are in space, or decide that it’s not necessary enough for me to smell the food on the plate in front of me. I hate the very idea of cancer—that my own body can decide to self-destruct. So I hate knowing that it’s so unbearably common.

I didn’t feel this way about the diseases I’ve encountered. I’ve made jokes about having all of them; the epilepsy (anyone need a milkshake?), the lazy eye I’ve attempted to repair seven times now, and so on. Perhaps when they happen to me I feel free to find the humorous stuff. When they happen to someone else I just want to go all Braveheart on them, even if Mel is an anti-semitic drunkard. I still want to get my Scottish rage out.

So I am working on something funny, something card-sized, something that she can hang her hat on, that I can pass to her with a warm meal for her after-surgery dining needs. If I’m open to what’s funny, maybe it’ll hit me. But not hit me hard.

I had a bet with Susanne, over no amount of money, that after she neglected to see a dentist for 8 years she’d have at least one or two cavities in her mouth. She disagreed, which is how I suppose I came to the prospect of “betting” her on the issue. I’d been tardy in seeing a dentist for just a couple of years, and lo and behold, I had three cavities to fill. So come on, her mouth must have been worse, right?

Xrays were taken, results analyzed and nope, the good doctor was nary any issues with her enamel. She patted me on the back to show both comfort and a certain degree of smugness, which if our fortunes had been reversed, I would also have communicated nonverbally to her. And so I trudged into the dentist’s office, contrite and humbled.

Teeth for me have a checkerboard history. I wore braces from 5th to 8th grade, and while I’m glad I avoided having them when I was in high school, I’m not sure middle school kids are any better. Train tracks, silver streak, motor mouth, they had a litany of names that I dodged about as well as the red balls in gym class. Thank goodness my income has never been based on dodgeball capability. I was used to the repeated trips to the orthodontist, who had blanketed the walls with smiling, cartoonized teeth so that we’d have something to stare at while he twisted our train tracks to painful levels. I couldn’t even bite into a French fry for the next four hours, it was so excruciating. And still, I would return, driven by my mother who read Women’s World out in the lounge while she allowed a guy who looked like Telly Savalis to perform sadism on her child. At the end of three years of rubber bands shooting off like errant fireworks in the middle of World History, the retainers that came undone and jabbed me in the face while I was sleeping, and the lesson learned the hard way that eating salt water taffy was way off limits, he looked at me, my face in his hands and pronounced that well, I still had a little bit of a cross bite, but nobody would notice.

I sucked it up and thanked him. I THANKED him for making me the target of other people’s orthodontia-ism, because my 13-year-old self was a cowering wuss. My 39-year-old self, well, let’s just say that if he tried to leave me with anything less than utterly perfect dentition, I’d be doing my own “almost perfect” surgery on his Yul Brenner face.

So dentists and I aren’t exactly the best of friends, but the one I found in Walla Walla does a nice job and tries very hard to be as pain-free as possible. When Susanne and I were relocating to Walla Walla, I felt a filling fall out of one of my upper molars. Well, I didn’t feel it fall out so much as I felt it go crunch crunch as I was attempting to chew something. And we still had four days to go before we pulled into town. So my first phone call was to a dentist who had been recommended by one of Susanne’s colleagues. They didn’t seem to understand the urgency of my situation when I called them.

“She’s booked until late October,” said the receptionist, as dryly as the desert air outside.

“But I have a hole in my tooth,” I said. To me, this meant “what else can you do for me? Another dentist in your office? A recommendation for another practice?

To her, however, this meant, “I AM STUPID. PLEASE CONDESCEND TO ME.”

“She’s…booked…until late October. Do you want to make an appointment for then?”

And I thought people in the health care industry wanted to be helpful. Silly me. I made the appointment, even though it was August 22. In the meantime I’d look for another dentist.

Meantime didn’t happen. The next week, lazy about continuing to eat on only one side of my mouth, I broke the tooth in half. Pain soon followed. I held in my hand what had until only very recently been stuck in my head, and saw red. Not my blood, just red anger. I called the receptionist back.

“I need a dentist and I need one now! My tooth just fell out of my head!”

“Why don’t you try Dr. So-and-so?”

Really? Did I move to a higher level of reception service or was I just not saying the right password the last time around? I thought I heard giggling and the exchange of money on her end of the line.

I called the other dentist’s office expecting not much more than nothing. But when they heard of my plight they told me to come right in. Now. I hopped in the car and realized, for the first time of many, that nothing in Walla Walla is more than 5 minutes away from anywhere else in Walla Walla. This apparently is a tradeoff for the fact that Walla Walla itself is extremely far from anything else, except Milton-Freewater, across the Oregon border.

And so my relationship with this dentist began. She gave me a temporary crown, and a week later, a real one to replace the good chunk I’d lost.

Fast forward to this morning, to get two cavities fixed and filled. She stuck some anesthetic in between my teeth and gums, and I was reminded of the woman on Intervention last night who had a problem with fentanyl lollipops. Now that woman had some dental issues, sadly. The taste of this stuff was strange, kind of fruity, kind of like cheap bubble gum.

“Wha is that flava,” I asked, identifying that I sounded like a lush after a bender.

“It’s called Walterberry,” she said, smiling as she put on her magnifying glasses, “it’s the best of the worst flavors they make.”

I wanted to ask why not procure the best of the best flavors they made, but that required too much diction, so I let it go.

Thirty minutes later, I didn’t feel the lower half of my face. But heck, who needs to feel 100 percent of their face 100 percent of the time? I hadn’t eaten breakfast, and now it was after noon. Maybe I could deal with soft food or something to drink. The hygienist, after all, had sucked out a good portion of my saliva, so I was on my way to either a crisp headache or becoming a human-sized prune, neither of which seemed like a good option.

My favorite coffee house beckoned. It was, of course, only 5 minutes away. This turns out not to have been enough time for the numbing medication to wear off, so I wound up wearing most of my tea and only realized I still had food in my mouth by placing my hand in between my cheek and teeth, and moving it to the back of my tongue where I could then swallow it. It was like manual eating, and certainly the aesthetic appeal of this can not be underestimated. I may have just discovered the next diet. Eat all of one’s food with one’s hands deep in one’s own mouth and double check to make sure there aren’t big chunks just sitting on one’s tongue. Do all of this in public. I can see the book title: Redefining Eating.

I was finishing preparations for the big Thanksgiving meal when my cell phone rang, and I saw on the screen that it was one of my closest friends. So of course I answered it.

“Have I got news for you,” she said.

My mind immediately computed all of the possibilities it could find in the 0.02 seconds before I began responding to her statement, which included, in approximate order, the following:

someone was pregnant

someone was pregnant with an alien fetus

I’m behind in watching V episodes

wow, DVR has changed my life

I’m sad Monk is ending

“What’s your news,” I asked innocently.

“Those people who crashed the White House party,” she said, in a hushed tone, “those were the people who own Oasis wine where I got married.” She spat out the last six words so quickly I needed an extra moment to parse them out and find the spaces between them. And then the memory section of my brain filled in everything I needed to recall about the Oasis Vineyard in Virginia. As it happens, there is not much good in those memory stores. A Hummer outfitted with the Oasis logo that camps out at the annual Vintage Virginia wine festival, with “club” members that are condescending toward everyone else. Stories from old coworkers about visiting the vineyard only to be snubbed as “too local” or not wealthy-looking enough to get decent service. When my friend told me she was looking at wedding venues and that those included Oasis, I told her I’d never heard anything good about the place. They took that under advisement but booked there anyway. It sounded so easy—they had caterers on hand, knew several good florists, and would cordon off the premises just for their event. Once the contract was signed, it was a different story. The events manager wouldn’t let them talk to any of the vendors directly, kept changing things that they’d requested, opting, for example, for the most expensive flowers the florist listed, so that my friends had to redo the order at the last minute, and worst, started billing charges to their credit cards without telling them what any of the charges were for. When the third $1,500 charge showed up on their statement, they had the account number changed. The next charge the vineyard tried to put through failed. They had a screaming phone message waiting for them when they got home from work. The whole thing reeked of some kind of badly orchestrated con game, and though the wedding went on as scheduled, they’re still paying off the credit card debt and are left with sour memories infecting what was otherwise a wonderful October afternoon.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear that these people had crashed the White House party. Not surprised in the least. They were probably wearing clothes paid for by fiancees all over the DC Metropolitan area. Without spending much energy on why they’d do such a thing, I’ll write them off as narcissistic or sick. The incident with my friends was only one example of the many people who have sued them over the years for breach of contract and so forth.

What really bothers me about this trespass into the White House is that it happened at all. You can show up without an invitation, without being on the list, and get past the Secret Service? Really? Aren’t they trained for like, spies and crap? How could anyone simply smooth talk their way into the room?

“I hope they get arrested,” said my friend.

“Sheesh, I hope so too,” I said, pulling the turkey out of the oven. “We can’t have people think they can just break security like that.”

“I know! Isn’t that nuts?”

“I guess you’ve never bought anymore of their wine, huh, even though you got a lifetime 20 percent discount for having your wedding there?”

“Guess what,” she said, sounding somewhere between bitter and smiling, “I’m never buying their wine again. Besides, they’re selling the winery, so I don’t think anyone will honor that agreement anyway.”

“Well, Happy Thanksgiving!”

“Happy Thanksgiving to you, Ev,” she said, and I turned back to the bird, which I had named Norbert.

It’s okay not to be wealthy, of course, especially if it means your soul is intact.

New developments from the media say that Michaela and Tariq Salahi, the crashers in question, are now seeking a high-paying interview with whoever winds up top bidder. They misunderstand how broadcast journalism works, then. Reputable media sources don’t pay people to be interviewed. What they really need to do is find a ghostwriter to come up with a book like, “My Crazy Pictures with Famous People,” and then they can get a book deal from some crazy publisher out there, like whoever was going to print OJ’s fakeish confessional, or the folks who printed The Turner Diaries. Of course, they won’t be able to make any money bragging about their trespassing if the Federal Government decides to prosecute them.

So for the sake of all of us who want absolutely no more primetime on the Salahis, or the balloon boy’s parents, or Jon and Kate, or the freaking Duggers, PLEASE, I beg of you, oh Federal Government. Arrest them.

As quietly as you can.

Every 6 weeks or so, it seems, we take a weekend or trip outside the confines of Walla Walla—this time it was to Eugene, Oregon, where one of Susanne’s oldest friends lives. We were ready for fun, good conversation, and even the potential of hunting in the woods for chanterelles.

I’ve never mentioned it before, but there’s a part of I-84 that weirds me out a little. A miles-long tree farm. It’s not that I don’t support the tree growth—I definitely do. It’s not that it take 10 minutes, at 70 miles an hour, to get past all of the trees, since I’ve driven by thousand acre woods many times before. It’s the regularity of the planting, the perfect squared distance between each tree, so that they’re plotted out on a grid, should you have the opportunity to see them from above. They look like alien-planted trees. As a person who grew up near several wooded areas, it seems weird to me that to ride my bike through these woods, I’d have to go in a straight line. That’s just . . . somehow harrowing. Driving past, the trees all start to drag on my peripheral vision. Row after row after row after row, they all point at the sky in brown-gray lines that start to resemble actual aliens. And then my head turns, just a little, because now I’m half-sucked into my deciduous voyeurism, and I notice that every so often, the space between rows is marred by one or a few fallen trees. Imperfection in the grid! Whew! And then I can get back to driving.

It’s possible I’ve lost my mind.

Anyway, we made it past the mindtrap of I-84 and continued on into first Portland, turning left to pass the state capitol, and then tucked into Eugene about an hour after dusk. It was difficult, in the dark, to get a sense of Eugene, especially from the highway, but it seemed to be the same splayed out street and residential design of Portland. Heck, it has a Trader Joe’s. Any city with a Trader Joe’s is A-OK in my book.

Susanne’s friend and her husband were happy to see us, but this moment of welcome was quickly supplanted by the greeting from their kitten, Ruby, who cantered over to us and began thoroughly sniffing our feet, ankles, and baggage. I half-wondered if she wasn’t one of the new covert drug-sniffing cats of the National Security Agency. Okay, okay, there are no such drug-sniffing cats. But heck, there could be. So she rubbed herself on us as we sat down to relax, which made me wonder: after 6.5 hours of sitting down driving, why am I sitting down to relax?

It was great to catch up; we discussed dining options and agreed to venture to Ratatouille for dinner. I kept waiting for a cute animated mouse to bring me soup, but it never happened. The all-vegetarian fare was enjoyed by all of us, 3 of whom are ex-vegetarians. I was annoyed at their idea of hummus, however. Just because chick peas are pureed and in a bowl doesn’t mean you can call it hummus—while these were supposed to be takes on the traditional preparation, they were a bit too far gone for me to hold them in the same category as hummus anymore. Or perhaps merging cilantro and garbanzo beans is good in its own right, but when I think hummus, I don’t think, “let’s have some cilantro!”

Dinner was tasty, and I appreciated that anyone would focus on creative vegetable dishes without a ton of accompanying pretense. What I was going to find out shortly, in fact, was that Eugene really doesn’t have much pretension, if it has any at all. We went next to Off the Waffle, a fairly new establishment that was just voted Eugene’s Best New Restaurant. Once again, category names don’t mean much, as Off the Waffle is a restaurant like one’s neighborhood chocolate shop is a restaurant, but I recognized I need to adopt more of the west coast laid back attitude. And I’m certainly not saying they weren’t the most ridiculously tasty waffles I’ve ever eaten. It was a quirky little storefront on the ground floor of a house, with a variety of savory and sweet versions of the Belgian liege waffle, a yeasted batter that they make with pearl sugar so they come out of the press puffy and caramelized. We sat on an old leather sectional sofa and ate out of our 100% recycled paper containers like jackals over a fresh kill. On all sides of us were the brown bags the owners use for the plain waffles—people walk in and out all day, ordering plain waffles to take home or to work, clutching the warm waffles and crinkling the bags in joy. But the bags on the wall are for decoration, each with the scribblings of some customer who was pleased enough to leave a happy, if not idiosynratic, note on the wall. It was like sitting in a room of non sequitors.

At that point, we were stuffed, so we trundled back to Susanne’s friends’ home, where the kitten was extremely pleased to see the return of her four scratching posts. And then there was Saturday.