The train's route skirted the southern edges of MIssissippi and Alabama in the night, unannounced for the benefit of sleeping passengers. Pensacola, too, would not be spoken of. I woke around nine, just in time to hear the last call for breakfast -- later reports told me there'd never been a first call. I didn't mind; I hadn't been particularly hungry, and I had stowed a freebie muffin and an orange in my sleeper just in case. Mostly, I wanted to get into the shower so I'd look and smell my best for my father, who would be picking me up in the bitty burg of Lake City, Florida -- a town whose sole claim to fame, as far as I was concerned, was that it was the closest stop on the Sunset Limited to Gainesville, where my father actually lives.
Today's paper was the Pensacola daily. It's a much smaller town than San Antonio, and they could only afford half as many comics, and only ran Ann Landers and... yes, the Billy Graham column. This morning's topic for the good Doctor Graham: Are Heaven and Hell real, or just symbolic?
Billy Graham's answer, as might be expected, was an unqualified 'yes.' He steered away from the traditional fire and brimstone scenario, however, and explained that the states were merely the presence or absence of the joy of (his) God in one's afterlife. Remember, he pushes a safe, mainstream, non-denominational brand of Protestantism, folks, and the fire and brimstone gag isn't Biblical to begin with.
Comforting, I suppose, if one happens to be that brand of Christian. I could think of several fabulously witty responses to that, some of which only had referents to a small number of people:
Hel? Sure, I've been there. Well, at least 'round to the eastern gate: Laurel'll poke my eyes out if I go any further. And it does have the presence of gods, 'cos, like, Diana gets possessed by Odin all the time when she's down there and Laurel's been known to peek in on Balder and I hear on Good Authority that Tyr really doesn't want to be there...
I'd have to say, actually, that a marked absence of your God in my afterlife wouldn't necessarily render the experience unpleasant.
But mostly I find it interesting in terms of How the Other Half Lives. Accepting that they ain't all out to get us is the first step in getting along, which is itself required for the desires of greater legitimacy I hear spoken by so many. There're a few raving assholes on all sides of the fences of faith, and there's bad news and good news, and they're the same news: I have yet to see anyone with either a monopoly on them or an exclusion of them. Even those of us who usually aren't assholes occasionally forget that fact.
I spent the next hour or so carefully packing everything that had been in my small compartment back into my bags. At ten AM, the conductor pointed out that we'd switched time zones, and as such it was now eleven AM: I dutifully changed the clocks on my Palm and cell phone, re-reminding myself to buy more Palm Food (aka AAA batteries). Cell service was steady and regular, as it had been since New Orleans. Eastern would be my time zone until Chicago -- the next two weeks would be spend here. I didn't even want to think about the e-mail box: checking it over the wireless link from the Palm had run me out of a set of batteries in record time: sparse coverage areas take more power and sap the batteries quicker.
After a patient wait, the car's shower finally came free, and I stepped in. The car shower has a head on a long, flexible hose. While the water gets quite hot, the pressure's rather low (to conserve what's in the tanks). Towels in two sizes and washcloths are provided by Amtrak, although all are of the standard motel quality: scratchy and cheap. The first call for lunch came while I was soaping up.
Ah, lunch call. Once clean and dry, I slipped back to Alex and Bryce's family-sized compartment. One of the attendants was processing the grief of her own maternal loss by getting emotional with Bryce, who as I reported yesterday had recently lost his wife. Alex indicated she wasn't hungry yet, and I discreetly withdrew. Unfortunately, by now the dining car was full, but at least I was first on the waiting list. I puttered back to my bunk to get the Amber omnibus in case the wait was long, then back to the dining car to sit and read it, when who should join me by Alex and Bryce.
Bryce plopped Alex into the bench across from where I was waiting with an easy grin, "She decided it was time for lunch." Ah, four-year-olds. Alex reminded me a lot of Ariel, only with better diction. It wasn't long when our party, upgraded from one to three, was called.
I ordered the pasta of the day, which turned out as penne in a luckless creamy tomato sauce. Bryce had a predictable cheeseburger and a Bud (he's from Texas, and not much interested in food save from a metabolic fuel standpoint). Alex had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, only she'd have no part of the crust, thanks, and I saved her from the horrid fate of eating all the chips by herself by stealing a few. And the burning question on Alex's mind was:
"When're we gettin' to Disneyworld?!"
It was explained, carefully and in stereo, that this wouldn't be until after dinner, which got a rather pouty response, I have to admit. And that, really was only to Orlando, it'd be the whole next day entirely before Disneyworld -- but that might've been too much to bear. Finally, she was consoled by the thought of the Oreos stashed in her sleeper (augmented on our way out by a waitress who slipped her two more snack packs of four Oreos each) and a bite of my turtle ice cream cake (twas tasty).
We spoke our goodbyes and went back to our compartments. I finished packing, tweaked a few images from the camera, wrote yesterday's entry, and got involved in conversation with the lady in the family compartment in my car, who was moving from California to Florida with her three children in tow. She was quite strikingly pretty, and the dreadlocks that stretched down to the middle of her back were clean and well-cared-for. I don't remember much about her children, really, but I liked the mother a lot.
When writing the page for yesterday, I realized I had no picture of Alex and Bryce, which would be a terrible thing to be without, as I adored little Alex so. I quietly stole to their compartment one last time, where they were sacked out, and father and daughter managed to look adorably cute for a couple pictures, the best of which I give you here:
Bags packed, bunk stowed -- I tipped the car attendant, who refused to be photographed, $20 for services rendered over the course of the past three days, not the least of which didn't directly impact me: when we'd been leaving New Orleans last night, a family of three thought they could all fit in a standard compartment (which you, Constant Reader, know to be sheerest folly from my previous reports), and the poor fellow had been at ground zero of a pissy passenger's core meltdown: some six hundred dollars spent, and her assertion that all Amtrak personnel she'd met had had an attitude. Really? I'd found quite the opposite, except for the harried hosts and waiters of the dining car, but they were more brusque than attitude-bearing. Even the phone drones had been decent people. Mind you, I thought the Screecher had had more than enough attitude to go 'round, and a little psychological transference and projection goes a long way in those cases.
Ten minutes to Lake City: the train rumbled through swampland. My tall suitcase stood beside me and my backpack was on my back. I had dressed to impress my father and brother: I was freshly washed, in black pants, a dark blue shell top, and a lightweight smocklike jacket (black). See... my father and brother are somewhat of the fundamentalist persuasion, and Dad's girlfriend verges on the outright Pentecostal, and this all taken together should explain the title.
Me? Uh, to them I'm in the spear closet, although it's more like a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy. If they looked me up in Deja News, if they put together the URL for my home page, well, they'd find it all; I make no secret of my spiritual life in my online personae. Religion has been a closed topic for family discussion since my lapsed Southern Baptist father married my less-than-devout Roman Catholic mother some thirty years ago; I merely wrap the old shadow of that conversational blind spot around me as needed for family relations and otherwise get on with life, like a comfortable old cloak. It doesn't hurt, either, that my parents are both a convenient twenty-five hundred miles away and are both too poor to come visit and too proud to ask for airfare.
While Lake City is the closest station on the Sunset Limited to Gainesville, that doesn't make it particularly close: we drove nearly an hour to get back to Dad's new apartment. Things took longer than expected, though: while pulled up at one stop sign facing a busy freeway, two minivans collided in a median cut, and Dad saw it happen. As a prison guard, he's been given First Responder training, and moreover had seen it happen, so he pulled into the median cut too.
He eyed the driver of the near minivan. "Ask her if she's okay." I was already rolling down my window. I may not have first responder training, but I do have the important Have Been in Accidents Before accreditation from the School of Life.
Once the window was down, I noticed she had a cell phone. So did another witness in the median, and so did the other minivan driver, and all were in use. I hadn't actually seen the accident, so I had no idea if they'd been using their phones before this little dust-up. I called out while mouthing exaggeratedly to her closed window, "Are you OK?" I flashed the OK sign with a questioning look.
She rolled down her window, babbling into the phone and clearly quite shaken. She shook her head, and I turned to Dad, "She's not all right -- she's in shock. You'd best get out there--"
He was already halfway out of his seat. Whatever his faults, I love my father. Apparently the driver near us was some kind of cancer patient, on her way back from the doctor, and was having chest pains. Hit by the steering wheel? Incipient heart attack? Psychosomatic? Damned if we knew, and it was about then that the police car pulled up, called by one of the several cell phones on the scene.
But while Dad tended to that, I reckoned we might be here a bit, Dad might be asked to act as a witness and the like. I indicated to Mike, "Get my cell phone and call Debbie, let her know we may be a little late." Eh, I love him too, but he didn't know her number yet, which made him less than useful. I pulled out my Palm and brought up the number, called it, left a message. Now Mikey was standing out there, too. Not like there was a damn thing he could do, but he was there anyway.
Once the police showed, our part of the show was pretty much over. Dad gave the policeman a verbal report and his contact data, and we got back on the road. Debbie had just gotten home, so didn't get my message and wasn't worried anyhow. I took everyone out to dinner at a Japanese eppan place (like Benihana, only not a chain) about half a mile from the apartment.
I ordered some tuna rolls along with dinner with the intent of both finding out if their sushi was any good and introducing the concept to my family -- I wasn't holding out much hope on the family, but I had to try. My order of 'tekka maki' made the waitress look at me funny, and my repeat of 'tuna roll' got her to explain exactly what a tuna roll was made of, at which I smiled wryly and confirmed the order. At a later exchange, I pointed out, gently, that I was visiting from California.
Funny thing, the waitress got a lot more polite when she realized I just might know what I was talking about, being from a place where we agreed there were many Japanese restaurants.
When our appetizers arrived, Dad bade us all hold hands while he said grace, a habit he picked up from his mother. Mind you, in my head it was an dialogue held in counterpoint: he would praise his God for something, all incredibly heartfelt and sincere, just as I chimed in mentally with something like, "And hail the cow who gave her life for the filets mignons, my thanks to the fishermen who brought the scallops and shrimp from the sea, I thank the spirit of the chicken, and thanks to the proud Japanese tradition of teppan-style cooking, and thanks to Everyone who got me across the bloody continent safely that I might eat with my brother and father this night." We were pretty much in agreement on the parts where Family was seen as a Good Thing, although I squeaked by on that technicality of modern English where 'thank You' works in singular as well as plural, which for a brief moment caused me to reconsider my one-woman crusade to bring back the singular/familiar 'thee.' But only for a moment.
This restaurant's teppan was competently prepared, if not with the showmanship of a Benihana performance. The tuna roll wasn't smelly, the wasabi was freshly mixed, and the pickled ginger was on a par with what you'd find out West. In California, it would be a competent middle-of-the-road teppan house, but out here it was a most excellent curiosity: the place was packed by the time we left for Debbie's apartment.
I borrowed Debbie's car and, with my brother to navigate, fetched more AAA batteries (mmm, Palm Food), then returned to base with a couple rolls of quarters and did my laundry. While that was starting, I dialed into Earthlink, ssh'd into home, and pulled up the old mail reader.
Good heavens! Two hundred fifty messages since I'd left Los Angeles! Noisy, noisy people! You're all wonderful, great discussions happened, Laurel caused a spinoff list (which I gave a permanent and better home to because Friends Don't Let Friends Use eGroups), Drew complimented my humble site, and I read as best I could given that I had to read quickly; Debbie only has one phone line. I even contributed to a thread or two before uploading a large website update and logging out. Then I sat with brother Mikey and watched Star Wars a bit (reciting lines, naturally), jotted up to twelve to poke Debbie's work computer, then came back down, finished my laundry, and wrote this.
Pictures of the family will be in tomorrow's report, naturally.
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