What Yesterday Teaches Me about the Day after Tomorrow

Geof Huth, "Unassuming Chandelier in the Lobby of the Garden Place Hotel, Williamsville, New York" (3 October 2011)

Garden Place Hotel, Room 159, Williamsville, New York

I am spending a second night in a strange place, a hotel in the Town of Amherst that is gaudy to the extreme ("so over-the-top that it can't see the top anymore," as I said to Jim and Patti Tammaro yesterday) but which is also quite pleasant hotel to spend a couple of nights.

I am in the middle of traveling for eight or nine days straight (depending on how I count days), returning home tomorrow for a moment before flying to Denver and then driving to Cheyenne. The world is a big place, and there are surprises within it.

Yesterday, I took my rental car through a tollbooth without the transponder I needed to pay for tolls. I did this even after reminding myself not to forget the E-ZPass tag. (I never listen.) I turned around to retrieve it.

And that error, that act of return, allowed me the chance to experience another strange event yesterday, a sequence of events that only I, of everyone in the world, could experience without being a part of it.

First, though, I have to note that the other problem with my rented SUV was that the low-fuel light came on almost as soon as I hit the New York State Thruway, with about twenty miles to drive before the appearance of a gas station. Even though I had thought that the manager of the rental car branch was telling me there was a quarter of a tank of gas in the car, she was actually telling me to bring it back with a quarter of a tank in it. (I never listen.) After I parked the car, I noted that my rental car statement showed the level of gas as "NO GAS," which is low indeed.

Stopping at the first possible rest area so that I could fill the vehicle with gasoline, I decided to buy myself a frozen coffee drink first. Yesterday was a warm day, and I am often warm when it is not warm. But I had to remind myself over and over to remember to fill the car with gas after buying my drink.

And I may have forgotten to buy the gas, given what happened at the coffee shop at the rest area. As I walked up to the store's counter, the man in line ahead of me was calling the young woman (petite and attractive), Stephanie and asking her if he knew how he knew her name. "I'm wearing a nametag," she answered, "I have a brain, you know."

I had seen this same woman on Saturday, as Nancy and I drove across the state on our way to give a reading in St Catharine's, Ontario. Nancy never saw the woman because she stayed in the car, having slipped on the wet back deck of the house the morning before hitting her back severely and putting her in great pain. (The multitudinous X-rays she was given showed she had no fractured vertebrae, except for the old fracture. Thing is she had no idea she had fractured her T1 vertebra sometime in the distant past. Surprises lurk everywhere. It might be their lurking that makes them so surprising.)

After annoying Stephanie with the question about her name, the man asked her what she thought of the yogurt the shop had for sale. She said she liked it, so he carefully, after studious consideration, chose one of the nearly identical yogurts. The transparent container held yogurt in its bottom two thirds and a plastic basket of granola held in place in the top third. The man asked what he was supposed to do with the granola. Stephanie explained that he was supposed to mix it into the yogurt.

Once he left, I ordered my drink: "A venti mocha frappucino," I said, and I agreed to accept the whipped cream as well, calm in my knowledge that such a substance is not good for a person with my genetic proclivities. Given how efficient I was with my ordering and paying (by card that merely needs to be swiped), I found myself in line behind the same awkward man once again.

He had already begun to work his flirtatious magic with the woman preparing his drink (some complicated coffee drink with substitutions from the norm, including the request that it be nonfat). He asked the woman how to mix the granola into the yogurt, but he figured it out himself. He asked her why the granola was kept separate, but then realized the answer and explained it was so the granola would not become soggy. He asked if the police could arrest him for driving while eating yogurt.

This woman was taller and less attractive than the other, but she was just as annoyed by his attention. After he walked away, the women first made sure that he had made it out of the building and then they started chattering about how annoying he was. This was the most animated they were. It was complaining about others that brought them to life.

I watched this entire act with a bemused smile on my face. All three of them entertained me, and I was happy to watch them, and happier not to be part of their comedic drama. I did not say a word to the woman or the man. Instead, I left the building, filled the car with gasoline ($67.69, I believe), and headed back onto the Thruway heading west at a nearly constant 75 miles per hour.

I stopped at the next rest area so I could use the restroom. After parking the car, I pulled out my phone to check for email and I looked out of the SUV in time to see the same man walking from the gas station with a container of gasoline. He was walking eastward, toward his car, which had, apparently, run out of gas. I've no idea how far back he was, but it could not have been too far. I didn't see his car on the side of the road, maybe because a tractor-trailer had cut me off suddenly within the last mile of the drive to that rest area.

As I saw that sad human walk eastward with his handful of gasoline, I felt sorry for him. He's a person who doesn't fit in this world. Not that any of us do. He's someone doomed to be trapped by his own personality, by his own self. Not that we all are not.

These fleeting compassionate thoughts of mine reminded me of living in the dormitory of the American School of Tangier. I was always given the roommates that no-one else wanted, like the high school boy who was still wetting his bed, and I was given them because I would be patient with them. I was the oldest of six children. As a matter of fact, though I almost never see any of my siblings, I am still the oldest of six.

I couldn't watch the man's entire trek, but I realized that he had suffered a fate I had escaped myself only because I had managed to remember something. (I never remember.) Otherwise, I'd be the man walking along the Thruway with cars driving by me fast enough that their speed could suck me into traffic.

But it didn't happen.

As humans, we enjoy narratives, especially narratives of unexpected coincidences. How, for instance, I became the only person to see this poor man's two unfortunate situations of the day: his interaction with two women and his running out of gas. How his story intersected with mine in ways that did not connect directly to the story at all. How we put things in context in order to understand them, even if the context that makes understanding possible is different for each of us.

This is a poem. This is a poem about my life as a human, as a poet, so it is a lyric poem. This is a poem about all of us.

As if any of us deserves a poem.

Tomorrow, I drive across almost the entire broad state of New York for the fourth time in five days, and for the sixth time in less than a month. Everything repeats, and that's how we remember everything, that's how it all seems meaningful.

The day after tomorrow, I fly to Cleveland, and then I fly to Denver. From Denver, I will drive to Cheyenne, Wyoming. I drove that way with Nancy, Erin, and Tim, once. I think it was in 1997. I drove from Denver past Cheyenne, where some rodeo was taking place, so I kept driving, I kept driving us north, past Chugwater and to Wheatland.

I think on Thursday, I'll be thinking of Chugwater again, because our car was low on gas, and we couldn't find a gas station in Chugwater so we continued north, not sure if we would run out of gas and be stuck on the east side of the road looking south for assistance.

ecr. l'inf.