Day 7: Lubbock, Texas

Note to self for future journeys: Do not try to spend the night in Lubbock. There are four or five or six Laquintas in Lubbock, lodged like insects in a spider's web of intersecting highways.

Late, after dark, and tired, I roamed from one to the next in growing confusion until I gave up and checked into one, not the one I had already paid for.

There is a nice Best Western right on the highway just south of town. Just stay there. In general, I am learning, choose motels for easy freeway access if all you plan to do in a place is sleep.

Day 6: Coralles, New Mexico

Miss Eloise had a fine old time playing with my cousins' gentle giant of a pit bull mix:

This visit was cut short by waiting until Monday morning to buy a new tire.

A wonderful time was had by all, nonetheless. Big Bobby commandeered one of his cousin's comfy beds and just took it easy. His arthritis, like mine, is greatly helped by the dry weather.

Days 4 and 5: Holbrook, Arizona

The first mishap of the trip. Long ago, I made a bargain with the Gods that I do not expect never to have car trouble, but that my car will break down at times and places where I can cope. Over the years, this arrangement has consistently worked.

West of Winslow, some unidentifiable but not very large object hit the side of my rear right wheel with a clunk, and the tire started to go flat. I got to a the next freeway exit where there was a Mobil station and some shade, and called AAA. It was mercifully not even too hot, since we were at high altitude and a breeze was blowing. The AAA guy arrived in due time, helped unload the trunk and dig out the donut, and put it on. Bobby and Miss Louise actually enjoyed roaming about in the shade and having drinks of water.

Back on our way, we got to Holbrook as planned on a Saturday night. It doesn't look as though anyplace that sells tires is open on Sunday, though, so we will stay a second night in Holbrook and get the tire Monday morning, cutting short our visit to another cousin in New Mexico.

Both Bobby and I are feeling the salubrious effect of the hot, dry climate on our joints. So much so that a second floor motel room is not much of a trial. I did not think to specify a ground floor room because my Best Western mindset involved elevators, somehow. However, if somebody else schelps our stuff up the stairs, I can get up without too much trouble.

Bobby stood at the bottom of the stairs, either daunted by the climb for his tiny arthritic body, or not being able to clearly see what we were doing. But when I said, "up, up, up," he bounced up ahead of me like a rabbit.

I am coming to understand why so many cousins ended up in the southwest.

Day 3: Goodyear, Arizona

We drove east from San Bernardino to Goodyear, just west of Phoenix, through hot dry desert where interesting rock formations begin.

The necessary rest stops are a bit of ordeal in the blistering heat, and all three of us are glad to do our business and get back into the air conditioned car.

We had dinner and breakfast with cousin Lia, who is several years older than I and whom I haven't seen for many years--perhaps not since her son's wedding forty years ago. She and her husband moved here to retire and let the southwest climate work its magic on the osteoarthritis that plagues us all in our family. Now her husband has passed away, and she herself is facing health challenges.

Eloise matches cousin Lia's living room rug:

Over breakfast we cheerfully discussed illness, aging and death, observing that it was odd to be so cheerful about it all but that not being cheerful won't make it not happen.

Lia luckily had heard on the news about a raging brush fire closing roads on the route I planned to take to Holbrook. So I've readjusted the route to skirt the fire. 

The little dogs stayed in the hotel room while we went out to breakfast. I have been leaving them for short periods. As it turns out, having me gone for ten minutes while I pack the car is OK, for fifteen minutes while I get a freebie motel breakfast in San Bernardino was OK, but for two hours while cousin Lia and I face death with equanimity over our benedicts--that is just too much. Miss Eloise expressed her opinion of the matter by deliberately peeing on an ottoman, and not on the pee pad in the bathroom. I know it was her because Bobby is too arthritic get up on an ottoman to pee.

I reported the damage at check-out and paid an extra $50. This amount suggests cleaning and not furniture replacement. Since there were stain traces on the ottoman to begin with, I wonder if Eloise is not the first dog to decide it smelled like the right place, and perhaps that ottoman has earned the hotel hundreds of dollars.

Day 2: San Bernardino CA

Greetings from Big Bobby and Miss Eloise--

We spent the day in LA traffic. It was very boring. But now we are at a motel off of  I-10 headed east, and mom put chicken treats in our toys, so everything is OK.

Mrs. Drinkwalter's Diary of the Eastward Journey: Day 1 Kettleman City CA

At a last meeting at Brennan's the night before last, someone suggested I blog this trip to keep everyone informed.

So I have resurrected this blog, with some machinations involving a text message by cell phone with an access code since I couldn't remember very much about how I used to get into it.

But here we are in Kettleman City, or at least the cluster of freeway services by the exit from I-5. We got a late start, so late as to get stuck in rush hour traffic leaving Oakland on I-580.

The two little dogs were freaked out about the packing and preparations, but as I predicted, happier once we were on the move. Old Bobby rides on my lap in the car, and when we get to the motel is happy as long as he has his bed, his food, and can find the water and a place to pee. He is kind of confused on waking, and stands there looking vacant until I get up and go over it all again with him.

Eloise is bored, but she will get a walk after we check out.

Today, an easy three and a half hours to San Bernardino

Yuletide Story

For more than a decade in the ‘80’s and nineties, I lived in a tiny studio over an old carriage house at the rear of a lot in North Berkeley. It was probably one of the oldest structures in Berkeley, older than the large house in front, which had also been divided into apartments. At a later time, long after the incident that I am about to relate, I even explored the possibility of having this little carriage house declared a historical landmark in order to prevent its demolition to make way for overpriced condos. This endeavor floundered for lack of sufficient documentation, and so I eventually had to move, but that is beyond the scope of this story.

The old carriage house had been erected with a steep, sloping roof, a rarity in California, perhaps by some recent pioneer from the East who had not yet thought through the architectural implications of the snowless Bay Area climate. My apartment nestled snugly under the roof, above a somewhat larger apartment that had been made from the original carriage house downstairs.

The yard was heavily wooded and overgrown; someone in the past had made careful and even magical planting choices: a hawthorn tree, rosemary grown to large bushes as it will in the California climate, a large stand of rue. The rent was laughably cheap, following a tacit Bay Area rental tradition that the tenant’s expenses can remain low as long as the owner’s expenses are virtually nil. A rickety outside staircase led from the ground to my door, passing over the door to the apartment below. At the top of the stairs was a tiny porch overgrown by the branches of an acacia tree, and my own door, a junkyard salvage item with a glass window.

I lived alone, as I have for years. I am a sound sleeper and, I should mention, a vivid dreamer. As a child, I was often confused about what had happened in my dreams and what had really taken place. As I grew up I learned gradually to sort my dreams out from my waking reality, but even as an adult I can sometimes identify a memory as a dream only because it is something improbable that seems to have happened while I was asleep.

It is also worth mentioning that the East Bay is demographically diverse and complex, perhaps more so than any place in the world. The cultural mix is rich and exciting, the crime rate is high, neighborhoods can change suddenly in character as you cross a large thoroughfare or a set of tracks, or for no apparent reason at all. My own neighborhood, as a friend once said, seemed “equally divided between the people trying to overthrow the government by force and violence and the people just searching for the perfect croissant,” with violent crime and drug-dealing to the south and west and the increasingly elegant homes of croissant-eaters mounting the hills above us to the east.

So in this apartment, in this city, very late on the night of the winter solstice, came a knock on my door. The room was long and narrow, and sitting up in my bed at one end I had a good view through the glass of the door. A young black man, handsome, lean and loose-limbed, stood looking at me. Unaccountably lacking in fear or hesitation, I got up, went to the door and opened it.

He apologized for bothering me so late at night; his accent was from somewhere in the Caribbean.  He held the street address of our little complex, 1315 Henry Street, scribbled on the back of an envelope. “Do you know Vanessa?” he asked. “I’m looking for Vanessa.”

I couldn’t help him. I knew everyone in the complex by name, none of them Vanessa.

He seemed disappointed, and shrugged. Then his face lit up with amusement, and he pointed to the door. “Look, you forgot your keys,” he said. I looked and there indeed were my keys, dangling from the keyhole outside the door. A little uncomfortable for the first time, I took the keys and closed the door. The young man rattled down the stairs. I glanced at the clock beside my bed—it was a little past three—and lay down to sleep.

The next morning I thought over the oddness of this event—my mysterious lack of fear, the discovery of the keys, and dismissed the memory as a dream.

Later that day, returning  from work, I ran into my downstairs neighbor. Peter was a wispy shadow of a man who lived on disability for some reason. I never knew the details. He and I had a cordial acquaintance based mostly on feeding each other’s cats when we left town. “Do you know anybody named Vanessa?” he asked. It was eerie to hear the name again so soon after the dream. I shook my head. “Guy was here about three in the morning,” he said, “looking for somebody named Vanessa. Jamaican, maybe.”

So it was not a dream. I performed the internal mental acrobatics required to reclassify the incident of the previous night as real, noticing how much more peculiar it appeared when recalled in that light.

But then, a year later, the story grew stranger still.

It was again around the time of the winter solstice. Peter had left town for the holidays, and his apartment downstairs was empty. Again, late at night, I was roused from sleep by a knock at the door, and a “hello.” In an instant, from that single word, I recognized the voice and the accent. My body froze in shock, fearful not of the young man himself but of the surreal nature of the unfolding events. “Yes?” I responded, not looking, not moving, not wanting to see the face that I knew was waiting on the other side of the glass.

“Do you remember me?” He called. “I was here last year. I was looking for Vanessa, but I didn’t find her.” He paused, and added, as if to jog my memory.  “But I found your keys.”

“I remember,” I called to him. “But I’m not going to open the door this time. This is just too weird.”

He laughed. “Well, Merry Christmas, then,” he said. He rattled down the stairs with the same sound that I remembered from year before, and was gone.

When I felt sure he was gone, something made me get up to look for my keys. They were in my handbag, where they belonged. I went back to sleep.

Long after, I told this story to someone I knew who was versed in the religions of the African diaspora. “Eshu, Papa Legba,” my friend murmured knowingly. “The Yoruba god Ellegua. He is all over the New World, by different names. The messenger of the Gods.  He’s a bit of a trickster, but he opens the way.”

I have long meant to weave this incident into some longer tale, a deep and important tale about the old Gods, and an opening of a way. But perhaps the true story is simple, and needs to go no further than this; a young man from the Islands had the wrong address, and lost a woman named Vanessa.