[Location: Delta, CA during Wes and Jenna Highfield's Wedding, perched on a bar while loud drunken discourse swirled around me and a bridesmaid threw up on Wes' cream-colored rental vest, September 18, 2010; also somewhere between Redding and Portland, OR September 20, 2010]
The blind's blades broke like bankrupt bureaucrats. The visage of venetians parted for vomit in the violent night, with train's cogs humming, with pain's moans moaning. But to the urgent bar back, bellows heckled, chuckled, hucks and sour beers hung in harangues of a groove-jam din. The mess we're in, huckleberry, greenhorn, wiggles, digs... and every flutter bleeds in a burlesque ballroom bed. The ringing of the bells in our heads will echo, fleck, wreck our sunrise with choo-choo stirrings of sleep in the Lakehead Delta dust.
...And I wake from that train track reverie into the snaking vestibules of the Coast Starlight, writhing north in this familiar trek back home to Portland. The space-black Monday gives way in shifts, slides in a hiccuping projector as my eyelids shutter-stutter, half-an-hour at a time. The sun comes first in faint promises of pink, illuminating a low, low fog in the valleys beyond the pass between California and the future.
I'm seated next to a crocheting grandmother whose charm lies in her willingness to share everything she's brought along for the trip. Cupcakes, cookies, crackers, Boston Baked Beans, assorted other candies. I decline these with several variations of "aw, no thanks," but accept her offer to pay for coffee if I go get it for the both of us. But this is all after I wake up. When we first sit down, I ignore her as I do anyone else attempting to commiserate via railway ramblings.
"If you get cold, feel free to drape this blanket here over your legs!" she says shortly after we take our seats in the dark coach car. "It's much too big for little old me."
I'm too tired to respond, and as of yet unaware of her relative sanity. But in the morning, with the young hick country kids howling in the lounge car, strumming horrendous renditions of Slayer songs and "Dueling Banjos" - as well as jockeying in decibel position the loftiest tolerances for whiskey in bogus Larry the Cable Guy impressions - we begin to chat. The "where ya headed? "Looks like rain!" "You ever been through this country before? There's a great Chinese restaurant here...at least it used to be here..." It's the typical discourse for a long-haul like this, and a position I dread being put in prior to boarding but secretly enjoy while I'm mired within it.
"I can churn out about 50 of these hats in a week's time," she boasts, fidgeting with burgundy and white yarns. She's crocheting hats for homeless youngsters, a program set up through her church, the warmth they'll provide destined for an impoverished nation of cold domes she can't quite now recall. "One of the one's by Mexico, I think."
"They're beautiful," I say and secretly mean it.
"Well, here then! Pick one!" she offers, fishing a finished beanie from her stressed snack bag. She'd apparently started and finished one while I dreamed. This one's greens and yellows, mellow hues for me, the mellow man trying to forget everything nice about the world. This gift serves no dual purpose, no bribe, no hidden meaning at all. It's just a hat made by a wonderful grandmother, destined, now, for me, an impoverished mellow man.
I never once looked her in the eyes. Told her I was a writer as she old-lady swooned and asked me my name so she could brag if I ever had anything published outside of magazines or newspapers.
"It's all a drop in the bucket," I tell her and dread to hear my own negativity.
I'm such a fucking defeatist. I'm such an asshole.
"You're gonna be just fine," she smiles, happy lines webbing the corners of where I should be seeing her eyes but cannot. "I've got a feeling about these things."
Someday, I want to accept a gift, a compliment, anything, and not wonder what I did to deserve it. Someday I want to give someone something and expect nothing in return.
