Epiphanies are few for me, now. The people I hang out with are just about my age. Many of them have let their ability to be surprised slip away over time. It’s easy to be fooled into believing you’ve seen it all. Because none of us have.
As a practicing outlier, I’ve honed my senses to look down often, searching for lost pennies. Still, at times, forgetting to look up for a cloud shaped like a turtle or a steamship. I can’t put my finger on a date when I stopped trying to discern shapes in the sky, but riding with my granddaughter reminded me that it is still a thing.
“Hey! There’s a bear lying on its back!”
Silly me, I peered at the roadside, hoping for an actual bear on its back.
“Over there,” she aided me with a slender arm and extended finger, pointing upward and out her side window.
It was the most well-formed bear on its back that I’d ever seen in the sky.
“Holy smokes,” I said. “It is a bear on its back.” It wasn’t hyperbole; it was a bear, if a bear was a cloud. He was fat and floating in the great blue sky somewhere in the mountains of Vermont.
We’d been traveling for a while, and she’d been a patient traveler. We’d already raided the snack cooler.
At her request, I filled it with the following, after it was given to me in list form the day before our trip.
Saltines and peanut butter—”Don’t forget to bring a knife.”
Sliced strawberries, sliced apples, grapes, water, and a couple of root beers.
“Can you bring Skittles?” she added later.
I did.
She’d never been to Burger King, at least that she could recall. That was a first stop after a couple of hundred miles. Not because I was trying to change her channel, eschewing her favorite chicken nugget emporium, but to get her the mandatory childhood paper crown.
“I didn’t know they gave out crowns. Can I have one?”
“Of course you can,” I retorted. She wore it for another hundred, taking it off a few minutes before she spotted the bear.
Out of nowhere, she said, “I love Burger King,” never mentioning it again during the rest of our miles.
At the hotel, looking much different from how it did in the website photograph, she was delighted. She was dreaming of entering the heated pool and hot tub.
Her father and I looked at each other with knitted brows. Both of us, with genetically-supplied large noses, sensed the common, bleachy smell of excessive disinfectant in and around the lobby area, and probably some airbound chlorine smells from down the hall, at the pool, available until eleven p.m., to hotel guests only. It said so on many signs.
It’s an inviting smell to those who seek clean conditions, but to cops, former and current, it’s an odor that might indicate past malfeasance. In this case, neither of us saw any evidence of that, but malodorous as our lives were and are, it keeps us on our toes. Me, less so, as I’ve learned to let go of a lot of things for the sake of keeping my mouth “up at the edges.” Something my Dad taught me as a youth.
My son, with a bit darker sense of reality, keeps his options open, figuring that things are always about to go south.
Some of that is my fault, for he has been subjected to the intricacies of darker stories since he was born. Me, only since I was twenty-five.
I digress.
After entering a surprisingly clean and neat room, the little lady couldn’t find the soap at the bathroom sink to wash her hands. Her dad went in, pointing out that the soap here was wrapped in paper, not a plastic bottle. I heard the crumple of the paper wrapper and her delighted voice, remarking about how wonderful the lemon-scented bar smelled.
She ran out of the bathroom, holding the bumpy bath bar in her tiny hands, directing it to my easily found nose.
“Smell this, gramp! And look at these bumps on the soap.”
I played along, as if I’d never seen such an elegant bar, running my hands over the multiple undulations on the lemony cleanser.
“These feel really good when you rub the soap on your back in the shower. You can’t get that with soft body wash.”
“I’m going to use it for my shower later.”
“Perfect,” I said.
The trip served a purpose beyond our main one. That appointment only took about an hour yesterday morning. Then we packed up to head home, still supplied with ample berries and saltines remaining in our cooler, hoping to make as few stops as possible before returning to our home state.
“Other than being with your dad and gramps, what were the two best things about this trip?” I inquired.
She took a few moments, moving her blue eyes back and forth as one might if thinking deeply, and said, “The hot tub.”
“I figured that would be on the list.” I waited for the second.
“And the soap,” she smiled.
The answer was wholly acceptable. The soap was unique in size and shape. Not surprising to those of us who grew up when bars of soap were the norm and plastic pump bottles not even considered as part of the bathroom experience. But to a young lady who loves sweet-smelling stuff, it was a new perspective.
“It WAS lemony. Did you like the bumps?”
“I did,” she said, smiling.
I felt smug, knowing that she’d found something unexpected on our trip. Something typically unseen and simple.
This thing, mundane as it is, is something to embrace.
I hope it will someday come back to her. I’ll be long gone, of course.
Somewhere, a lady will be able to walk into an economy hotel, because that’s what’s available, and be happy with the accommodations,
She will be able to overlook the evident faults and imperfections, looking forward to using the pool and hot tub after a long day on the road, recalling a similar time when she could smell the chlorine while waiting for the clerk at the check-in desk.
She might walk into a surprisingly neat and clean room, at a place that still embraces old-school soap, sinkside.
The lady will slowly unwrap the soap, bringing the bumpy bar to her delicate nose, and hope that it’s lemony, like that time when she was seven in Ticonderoga, New York.
She will have learned to embrace the mundane, just as her dad and her grandfather did.
From the Jagged Edge of America, I remain,
TC
Thanks for reading the stuff, your support through BuyMeACoffee, buying my books, reading my Facebook entries—I appreciate all of you. tc