7/4: Independence Day in Nashville

Whitesville to Nashville:  I took first shower.  Drove out and Tim put on an impromptu playlist of American-themed music.  Sousa, etc.  By the time we’d broken into modern stuff (i.e., repeating on a loop Whitney Houston’s 1991 Super Bowl performance of the National Anthem) we arrived at the motel.  Econo-Lodge.  Very nice.  Not as close to the city as we’d thought it would be.  On the internet I discovered a chicken festival (your guess is as good as mine) and pinpointed it on my map.  We headed towards it with Tim driving but it didn’t take us to Nashville center so we didn’t check it out.  Just turned around and drove towards the big buildings we could see some miles away and hoped that something would be there.  Soon it became clear that we were on the right track.  Passed Nashville’s pretty City Hall.  Tan building with columns.  That’s all it takes to impress me it seems.  Eerily there was almost no traffic in this part of the city and I wondered if that was on account of its being a holiday or just the way Nashville was.  I would have expected there to be MORE traffic on a holiday.  Maybe relatedly the city was very, very quiet.  We parked in a complex (there were a few of them around and well-marked…good planning, Nashville) and when we stepped onto the street there was not a voice to be heard.  I may be misremembering but I think I could even hear the wind. 

We walked towards a street where we saw people convening and what do you know!  Turned out this was the Music City July 4th Festival, Nashville’s big event and probably the reason the city was reported to be so much fun on the 4th.  What luck!  The city had blocked off much of Broadway, a main street apparently, and along its sides were stands where one could buy beer or lemonade or water if one so chose.  Cleverly there were also “mist stations,” from which mist (duh) was steadily sprayed and under which you could walk to cool off if overheating.  I took advantage of one midway through the day.  For some reason my feet felt like they were BURNING the whole time we were walking around.  Are Converse really poorly ventilated?  Were my socks producing like an inordinate amount of friction inside my shoes?  Was the heat of the pavement rising through my soles and baking my feet?  Don’t know what it was but it made walking very uncomfortable. 

After we’d walked the street and taken the lay of the land we decided to get lunch and so stopped at a big bumping place called “Brewhouse Downtown.”  Food was fine.  The menu had lots of Southwest options on it and this was somewhat irking as we’d just come from the Southwest and I was hoping for something more Nashville-specific.  Does Nashville have an original food culture?  I dunno.  Big beer selection, anyway.  We sat a horseshoe-shaped bar (one of at least two bars in the facility but the only one shaped like a horseshoe) and it was manned by a sole waitress/bartender.  There probably should have been more than one waitress/bartender because service was slow.  My Cajun sandwich, though tasty, came to me lukewarm.  Above the horseshoe bar were two flatscreen TVs.  The one closest us was playing a TV movie about Babe Ruth starring a young John Goodman (it looked TERRIBLE but we couldn’t hear the dialogue).  More attention-grabbing, though, was the program playing on the farther TV: Nathan’s Hotdog Eating Contest.  The whole thing was so captivatingly absurd.  I said to Tim that sometimes clips of Japanese gameshows used to play on American TV and you’d watch them and think, “What the hell is going on over there?”  American TV appeared to be creeping ever closer to that level of absurdity.  Nathan’s Hotdog Eating Contest was meant to be ironic, right?  Right?  With its little pre-competition American Idol-esque contestant biographies (for who could become invested in this without first learning about Joey Chestnut’s longtime girlfriend or “Megatoad’s” impoverished family or whatever)?  Yet there was something sincere in the sheer athleticism on display.  This was a real challenge being undertaken by real people.  You could see the eaters sweating and struggling and you couldn’t help but empathize and take sides and root root root for your man.  Hard to get the tone of something like this and maybe, I thought, it was because I rarely watched TV anymore but I felt as if I were party to some foreign ritual.  To me this was as strange as any Japanese show – but hadn’t I been to that very boardwalk and seen people who looked just like that and even eaten Nathan’s hotdogs?  Again, hints of insanity.

Left BD and walked Broadway.  In addition to the pop-up beer/lemonade stands there were bars all over the place and in each bar a band playing.  Some places were more hip than others.  We walked to the far end of Broadway which was incidentally the Kiddie Korner and there were lots of kids running around having the time of their lives.  Blow-up castles and bouncy houses.  A GIANT INFLATABLE SLIP ‘N SLIDE!  We didn’t partake though joked/thought about crashing the bouncy house.  Here, as at the other end of the street, a band was performing live in front of a sizable crowd.  The crowd was moving around and not all listening.  Tim and I on the other hand took a great interest.  The band consisted of two college-aged guys, one college-aged girl, and an elderly man.  One of the college-aged guys was bearded and played bass and the other was the featured soloist on every song and was unassuming and imposingly talented.  The college girl sang lead and had a cotton candy pop-country belting voice.  She was a good showman although she didn’t take many chances musically.  The last band member looked as if he could have been the singer’s father.  He was gray-haired and had a bushy walrus mustache and played guitar but rarely soloed.  During some bits (a guitar solo for example) he and the LS would talk into each others’ ears as if discussing strategy.  It was an intriguing relationship.  Later as we moved through the bars we discovered it to be common practice for a band of young people to recruit a veteran to play backup guitar.  Made sense but resulted in some strange visuals.  A foxy (untalented and perpetually hoarse) young woman backed by a Mark Twain lookalike.  Mattie and Melody backed by the Nashville Old Folks’ Home. 

After leaving the KK we roved from bar to bar looking for the perfect combination of atmosphere (dive-y but not empty and sad OR packed and rowdy) and band (girl pop-country of the kind we’d left behind at the KK).  First bar was promising but played too old-timey music and the singer (mentioned above) was too basic; second bar was packed and featured a trio of singing, strumming high schoolers (automatic disqualification); third bar was full of dancing high schoolers (even worse); fourth bar was too empty and ratty.  We were on the verge of giving up.  Then we walked by a big marquee: “TEQUILA COWBOY.”  It was very noisy and very big and colorful and these were all (to Antisocial Me) bad signs.  But they weren’t carding at the door (just an added encumbrance) so we slipped in to survey the scene.  Full of people but not uncomfortably so.  Music loud but not insurmountable.  Two barstools available not AT the bar but on a little island proximate to it.  On one wall a huge amateur painting of Spaghetti Western-era Clint Eastwood.  Band: awesome.  Lead singers were a beautiful woman and a wispy haired short dude.  WHSD, who turned out to be named Brett, played guitar and had a consistently on-pitch if unmemorable voice.  Apparently he was a Nashville boy.  BW, who turned out to be named Bethany Pope, was an extraordinary belter.  Voice better suited to rock than country but she sounded good on everything.  Bethany had a pretty, light high voice too.  Truly a dynamic talent.  She smiled and laughed whenever she wasn’t singing and seemed like she would be a blast to hang out with.  Every now and then Bethany would walk around the bar with a tip jar and I gave her two dollars over the course of the three-plus hours we were there.  They deserved it.  They played popular country songs and took requests and at the end of their long and highly satisfying set Bethany sang “What’s Up?” by 4 Non Blondes.  I expected her to sing it like the 4NB soloist but she didn’t insofar as she hardly used her high voice.  She didn’t have to.  Instead she belted the whole thing and it was just mindblowing.  Three minutes of no holds barred belting.  She was so damn good.  The band, called “Points West,” also featured a great old-guard guitarist named Rusty Russell.  Rusty was wasted even when we got there at like 3pm but still rocked it.  Tended to yell out sarcastic things after songs: “Does it need a Jack and Coke up here or is it just me?”  “You know in most parts of the country when a singer asks the audience to sing along they actually sing along!”  “I was thinking about getting out of the business when this song came out.  I remember.  It was 1972.”  Sometimes in the middle of his solos he’d play the first part of the National Anthem to great applause.  Impressive that he could find and work in the melody in any key.  After a while though it stopped seeming like a cute tie-in, more like a cynical applause-inducer.  Tim and I loved, loved, loved Rusty and aspired to be him and felt like we were in many ways already him.

Finally we left around 6 (when Points West finished their set).  We checked out the potential fireworks sitting areas and weighed our options.  Should we go back to the car and grab our fold-out chairs and then wait it out until 9:45 when the fireworks would reportedly begin?  That had been the plan all day.  But now Tim made the argument that we should probably go back to the motel.  Why?  I’m not exactly sure but it felt like the right move at the time.  And in a way it WAS the right move: back at the motel we could relax on beds in front of a TV AND see the fireworks.  We were also tired.  Really tired.  And the idea of staying up and active for three more hours was…daunting.  Went back to the motel room and ordered dinner.  We got pizzas (medium cheeses for each of us) and Tim got breadsticks and I got wings.  We watched INDIANA JONES and determined that IJ was really an embodiment of the American pragmatic spirit.  Willing to shoot an enemy where the honorable thing would be to engage him in a sword fight or whatever.  Ducking for cover when his oblivious enemy was soon to be chopped to pieces by an airplane propeller, etc.

Around 9pm Tim and I heard some popping sounds outside and walked out to see if we could spot fireworks.  Barefoot we made our way to the Nashville side of the motel overlooking the pool.  There were fireworks going off in three towns and we were far enough away to see all of them.  Kind of a panoramic view.  Over Nashville we could see some big colorful ones going off and figured we’d been given faulty intel about to the show’s starting time.  There were a number of people outside on the balcony and by the pool on the level below watching and no one was talking.  We walked back to the motel room and Tim said he was satisfied.

7/3: More Small Town Adventures

Sallisaw to Whitesville, Tennessee (yes, seriously):  Woke up and showered.  The Sallisaw motel was subpar and it made me wonder how it had been so highly reviewed on Google (its high rating had been our main reason for choosing it).  All became clear when I took my shower.  The water pressure was something to behold.  I felt like the grime of the previous day was being sand-blasted off of me.  It was actually almost painful.  One knob for hot water and another for cold, which I think I prefer to the standard “all on a spectrum” temperature control you encounter in Today’s Showers.  (Surely there’s some subtle ideological reason for this shift.)  I turned the shower off and felt already dry, which should give you a sense of how hot and pressurized the water was.  Great shower, top ten all time.

Drove across the street to a diner attached to a gas station.  Shades were pulled over all the windows and I thought that was a bad sign.  When we got in the place was huge and clean © Treesha.  One side was the kind of convenience store you’d find at any gas station but it was more expansive.  You could buy not only soda and junk food there but jeans and t-shirts most of which had American flag graphics on them or slogans in support of the Second Amendment.  The diner portion of the building was expansive too and probably excessively so.  There were a lot of tables and a lot of people sitting at the tables and the two waitresses (a heavy blonde woman and a teenage girl) seemed overburdened.  From the bar where we sat I could see straight through to the stainless steel kitchen.  There were three or four chefs back there but the food was coming out slowly.  At one point a big fat tan guy who immediately struck me as being a trucker but may not have been came up to the bar and yelled, “Where’s my eggs and sausage?”  I thought it was a joke but the waitresses looked at each other uneasily and said the food would be out shortly.  Yikes.  There was a neatly written sign at the pick-up window that read, “We have the right to refuse anyone service.  Thank you.”  When the blonde waitress came to take our orders I asked if they took cards here and for a moment she just stared at me with a curious expression and I wondered if she were considering refusing me service.  But then she smiled and said yes and was very charming and jocular for the rest of the time we were there.  The food took a long time coming out by diner standards but the waitresses were very quick on the coffee and water refills.  (To our credit the enormous amount of liquid we consumed that morning led to nary an extra bathroom break.  Road shape.)

Took 40E towards Memphis and Nashville and Tim drove first as per tradition.  He was a bit jittery from the coffee.  Listened to a Yale lecture on Greek history and I didn’t really pay too much attention to its content.  Only kept hearing the lecturer clear his throat after like every sentence and it was killing me inside.  Like water droplet torture for my ears.  We didn’t make it through the lecture; not spirited enough.  This guy was no J. Ruf.  I looked up a Yale lecture on hermeneutics which I claimed Tim would like but it was also too cerebral and slow-moving (I maintain that Tim WOULD like hermeneutics under different conditions).  Eventually we started listening to a Katt Williams standup special (the one filmed in Atlanta where he’s wearing a bright green suit) and got some chuckles out of it.  Before it could finish we switched over to Louis CK to finish yesterday’s yet incomplete standup special.  (Somewhere around Sallisaw our 4G disappeared so we hadn’t been able to hear the show’s conclusion.)  We stopped at a MacDonald’s there to pee and get iced coffee (more liquid!).  Lots of traffic.  It came as a surprise to us that it was lunchtime for normal people.  I guess we’d lost track of time.  When we finally pulled up to order I said very clearly, “Two large iced coffees, both black, no cream or sugar in either.”  The order was repeated back to me correctly and appeared on the screen correctly with “NO Crm NO Sgr” below each “Lrg Iced Cffee.”  Then Tim in his infinite wisdom instructed me to ask for extra ice in his iced coffee.  I objected that they’d surely screw up the order if we asked to change it now and he persisted so I relented.  We eventually made it up to the final window and even before it opened I could see the server holding two large iced coffees so filled with cream as to be nearly white.  When the window swung open the server was smiling but before he could say anything I said very sternly, “I’m sorry I specifically asked for no cream or sugar in either of these coffees.”  “No cream or sugar?”  The server withdrew into the kitchen and the rest was all but inevitable: he returned with two amber “coffees” that were about 50% water and about 47% ice and about 3% coffee.  Neither coffee had more ice in it than the other.  And to think we would have been golden had we kept our order simple.

I think I took over driving at this point.  Crossed the Mississippi and Tim once again expressed displeasure at its not being wide enough.  There was a huge pyramid to our left as we crossed and it looked spookily like the Luxor except that instead of being black it was covered in a cheap-looking metallic siding.  I suggested that they might be cooking up a massive hamburger scramble inside.  Hit terrible construction in Memphis.  Memphis, get it together.  One bridge was walled up so that the only driving lane was about ten feet wide with no shoulders.  To make matters worse there was an unavoidable rumble strip on the left side of the road.  So I was driving over this poorly paved, rumblestrip road trying not to swipe the barriers a foot away to my right and a foot away to my left.  We decided not to go back to Memphis once we’d crossed the city limits.

At around 4pm I spotted a BBQ restaurant.  We hadn’t eaten lunch and so I immediately  pulled over and drove around the restaurant all the while discussing with Tim whether we should stop here.  He was amenable but didn’t himself want to eat.  Not wanting to stop just for me I pulled around the building to leave and…it turned out they had a take-out window!  Deus ex machina.  I ordered a Jumbo Pulled Pork Sandwich with cole slaw and pickles and it was delivered to me in a Styrofoam box along with a plastic fork but I couldn’t wait to eat it and so ended up using my right hand to hold it and sneak bites of it while driving the on highway.  Meanwhile I used my left to turn on and off the cruise control and to use my blinkers and to switch lanes © AMT.  Spilled only a drop of BBQ sauce/grease on my jeans.  Pulled off the rest of the driving masterfully and therefore felt almost godlike.

Tim and I checked into our Super 8 motel and it was unexpectedly nice.  Apparently the woman at the desk had fleeced us: “Oh, you wanted TWO beds?  That’s gonna cost you….”  So maybe the room was exactly as nice as was to be expected.  But it WAS nice and nicer than Sallisaw (except for, it turned out, the shower).  One complaint: there was a fly in the room and it irritated us.  Not really the motel’s fault though.

We went looking for a grocery store.  Figured we could buy a chicken or something on the cheap.  Drove through Whitesville and at first couldn’t tell if it was an up-and-coming town or one on the decline.  Finally got to the main street and decided it was definitely on the decline.  Boarded up shops.  Decaying marquees.  This had probably been a charming little town in the 70s.  No more.  There were still at least three churches here though.  I even think I saw signs for the forthcoming erection of a new church.  Whitesville: Earth's Highest Number of Churches Per Capita!  We made our way towards Sam’s Grocery, which we’d seen listed on Google Maps.  We turned a corner and saw a run-down gas station with some cars in front of it and I said, “Wait – is that place OPEN?”  Tim responded: “That’s Sam’s Grocery.”  Decided against Sam's.  Drove along the highway back to our motel and I saw a big pink tank that I recognized as a slow cooker and pulled into the plaza it was part of and found a BBQ joint and decided I’d try to get something now and save it for later.  Tim still wanted nothing.  I got a pound of chopped pork with hot BBQ sauce, which they gave me on the side in a cup as if doubting my ability to handle it.  We went back to the room and watched NFL Channel theatrical recaps of Superbowl seasons.  Then we watched Chappelle’s Show.  Then BRIDESMAIDS.  By this time it was about 7pm and the sun was still up.  Tim said, “I’m gonna set the alarm for 7:30 tomorrow,” and I replied that he usually fell asleep within fifteen minutes of announcing the next day’s alarm time.  He waved me off but sure enough was snoring by 7:45.  He woke up again at 8:15 and ate what was left of my pork.  We flipped through the channels and came upon – No!  It couldn't be! – 42!  Recognized it because it was playing from the exact spot we'd left it in Flagstaff!  Uncanny!  It was a moment of celebration.  Spontaneously I did an impression of the Chicago kid’s “Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!"   Tim did J. Rufus Fears’ turkey-like “HOYOYOYOYOYOYOY!” which was apparently the sound Athenian women used to make when ecstatic.  Tim fell asleep watching it.  At some point I flipped away and ended up watching “Fresh Prince” late into the night.  Will Smith used to be such a great actor.  Will Smith, get it together.

7/2: The Road to Sallisaw

Santa Fe to Sallisaw, Oklahoma:  Woke up on the early side and got breakfast with Maya at the St. John’s dining hall.  It was just one big room and reminded me of a dining hall I’d seen at Bowdoin, only smaller.  We paid up front with a middle-aged cashier named Oliana. Oliana had a thick Russian accent and a thick build and wore thick blue eye shadow.  Looked like she’d been stuck on the set of the “Lady Marmalade” music video for ten years.  There was an automatic coffee maker in the dining hall and it had flashy lit-up buttons and a plasma display and was clearly new.  But auto-coffee is auto-coffee no matter the oldness or newness of the machine producing it.  I pressed the button for “Hot Coffee” and nothing happened so I pressed it again and again.  Oliana ran over to me shouting, “Only press once!  Gentle, gentle!”  Sorry, Oliana.  I should have read the instructions page before playing.  (Tim Note: The same thing happened to me.  I was holding down the button and Oliana ran over screaming, “No, no hold button!”)

The dining hall had an omelet bar, which was awesome.  Loaded up on eggs and sausage and salsa and beans then took off.  Spent the day on 40E.  Our plan was to pull a Flagstaff: drive for a few hours and then pick a little town where time/distance-wise it would make sense to stop at a motel.  Figured out our destination at a Texas restaurant called “Calico County Diner” or some such.  CCD was spacious and full of knickknacks from the 1950s.  The tables and floor were made of a darkly finished wood that looked a little worn.  Our waiter, a red-bearded guy with a reedy voice, came to the table and set down a basket of biscuits and fried cinnamon rolls.  Yes, please.  He seemed mildly surprised by everything we said.  “Can I get you anything to drink?”  “Water’s fine.”  “Water…?”  “Actually can we have some coffee as well?”  “Oh…so…two coffees?  And the water?”  “Yeah and can you make mine an iced coffee?”  “Oh…we don’t…do that here….”  We used our map apps to plan the next stop and decided on Sallisaw, OK.  Combined with our grunginess (we’d showered in the morning but were wearing old clothes) the scheming tone of our conversation made me feel like we were bank robbers planning our next job.  Maybe that’s why the waiter was spooked: we were clearly outlaws.  On our way out I saw that CCD was situated next to a sad-looking restaurant called “TX Chicken: Thai, Chinese, and Japanese Cuisine.”  All styles converging towards “Asian.”

Crossed the Oklahoma-Texas line without realizing it.  There wasn’t a “Now Entering Oklahoma” sign and it was a let down as we’d been hoping to take a picture of such a sign and send the picture to our friend Say Tay.  Finished J. Rufus Fears’ lectures (the ones on Philip and Alexander were AWESOME) and I kind of wanted to listen to them all over again because I felt I’d missed so many details the first time around.  Listened to the first of J. Ruf’s “American Liberty” lectures but the pace of his speech was slower and his tone less belligerent than we’d come to expect (he’d delivered these lectures later in life) and he started putting us to sleep.  Passing through OK City we put on Dave Chappelle’s “For What It’s Worth” and that woke us up.  Chappelle is brilliant.  Then we listened to part of a 2013 Louis CK special.  He’s brilliant too.

Before we left Santa Fe, Maya told us the exciting part of the drive was over and she was half right.  Texas and especially Oklahoma looked to us like Upstate New York or Pennsylvania.  Not so exotic as Arizona or New Mexico.  But Tim and I were actually happy with this.  It was nice to drive familiar-looking roads.  We understand how we were supposed to drive here.  Easy.  The easiness of the roads also allowed me to execute a record-breaking lane change: .7 miles from middle to left lane, beating Tim’s previous record by .2 of a mile.  (POINT: ME!!!!!)

We pulled into Sallisaw around 8pm.  It was effectively just a road with trucker-friendly stores scattered around it.  Tim and I checked into our motel (Sallisaw Inn) and started to move our stuff into our room and discovered upon opening the door that the room was about 100 degrees.  Turned on the AC full blast.  As far as we could tell there were only three other parties at the motel (only three other cars at least…one an old Chevy Cavalier with a sticker on the rear windshield reading “In Loving Memory: ‘Jimbo’”).  We were all of us placed at different corners of the motel and Tim pointed out that this was a thoughtful touch.  I didn’t understand how it could be considered so until we turned on our room’s old fat-back static-producing TV whose volume needed to be pumped up to overcome the hum of the AC unit.  Very noisy.

Went outside and did an interval workout in the parking lot and the sunset was pretty although we weren’t really watching it.  Then we took off down the Sallisaw drag looking for a grocery store where to buy beer and dinner for me (Tim skipped).  Most of the stores were closed (it was 8:45) but there were a number of pop-up firework stands set up in empty parking lots.  Firework sales were booming in Sallisaw (Greg Note: I realized like three days after writing this that it was a brilliant pun).  Found a “food mart” called “Marvin’s.”  They were ten minutes from closing by the time I walked in and their premade food items had clearly been sitting around all day.  Mostly fried chicken.  I found a “Chef’s Salad” that featured ham and bought it for being the least fried thing available.  Also bought baked beans that turned out to be marinating in a too-sweet BBQ sauce.  Marvin’s didn’t sell beer (how high-and-mighty of you, Marvin’s) so we went elsewhere.  Drove back to the room which still seemed to be 100 degrees.  There we watched the tail-end of BEETLEJUICE on ABC Family (so, so good…Tim Burton, what happened to you?) and then watched EASY A on FX.  EASY A was sort of incomprehensible to me.  There was this really dark turn towards the middle involving Lisa Kudrow that mucked up the tone of the movie and was totally unnecessary.  Anyway I hoped my inability to "get" EASY A was not a sign of impending or already-arrived-at insanity.  Frankly I can’t even remember if we made it through the end of the movie.  (Tim Note: We did.  Furthermore, I [Tim] liked OK and could see myself living there.  It was green.  First state in about a week I could see himself living in.)  (Greg Note:  I didn’t have much love for OK but really liked New Mexico, possibly because it was CORMAC COUNTRY.)

7/1: Notes on NPR and Santa Fe

Flagstaff to Santa Fe:  In the morning we woke up without any hurry and Tim took first shower.  The shower was a marvel of utilitarian design.  The head came down from the middle of the ceiling and pointed towards one corner of the closet-sized bathroom.  A curtain bisected the bathroom so that the shower itself was a triangular cell and the water came down from over the curtain.  I didn’t find it too uncomfortable despite its size.  Certainly appreciated the thrifty use of space.  While I was showering Tim started watching the American Filmic Achievement 42 about Jackie Robinson’s very, very, very courageous actions in the face of abject (Southern) racism.  The dialogue sounded like Spike Lee had written it in the midst of an Ambien-fueled cyclone.  It was like an hours-long movie trailer.  Everything was very Dramatic and stunk of self-seriousness.  A bevy of white rednecks threatening Jackie Robinson to “skedaddle.”  “The Brooklyn Dodgers ain’t gon’ change our way of living.”  Yikes.  A wise-beyond-his-years boy (JR’s son?) and an all-supportive, all-committed Mrs. Robinson.  Aristotle said that tragedy should represent nobler-than-average men so as to make their inevitable reversal of fortune more affecting.  Surely he’d have had to revise his thesis had he lived to see 42.

Tim and I skedaddled out of Flagstaff about 11am.  The drive through Arizona was uneventful but things were becoming greener all the time.  Saw quite a few coppers on the road.  Arizona was the only Western state where we’d encountered any sort of serious highway patrol presence.  Big Government.  If only we hadn’t given up our guns!  Listened to a never-ending Terry Gross interview about fish imports and exports and it was...trying.  There was apparently SO much to say about fish.  Turns out that freezing fish makes its cell membranes erupt, which is why certain imported cuts strike us as being “flaccid.”  This was the most interesting thing the program had to tell us.  Mind-numbing.  Passed through a Navajo reservation.  A few road signs advertising “Clean Bathrooms!”  Drove through to New Mexico and saw a few more dust devils.  Strong winds pushed us around the road.  Dust blown up around us.  Stopped in Gallup at a place called "Earl’s Restaurant" (not a chain!).  Outside there was a flea market setting up.  When we got in we were seated at a table set for four.  The place was very pink and cheap looking and charming.  There were tons of people.  We sat looking at the menu and every now and then peddlers would come by offering flea market wares (yes, inside the restaurant), mostly homemade jewelry.  We’d kind of wave them off and they’d thank us anyway.  Tim asked for an iced tea and I for a coffee and soon our waitress returned with a full pitcher of iced tea and a full pot of coffee and left these with us.  Then we ordered: Tim had a BLT with turkey (light on the turkey) and I had calf liver with onions, which also came with mashed potatoes and green chili and a dinner roll and pinto beans and would have come with dessert if I’d wanted it.  All this for $10.  The whole thing was swimming in gravy and it was incredibly rich and at the end I felt satisfied but also as if I’d been put in my place.  Hubris to think I could casually put down this meal, this feast.  Tim confirmed that no one seemed to be talking at Earl’s, but the atmosphere was somehow far jollier than the Luxor’s.  People were there with their families.  The place seemed to be a staple of the community and on the wall next to us there were old pictures of patrons and their families and former proprietors and plaques commemorating the restaurant’s having given back to the community in this way or that.

Tim took over driving.  On NPR Kai Ryssdal seemed exasperated.  “Soooo…[three second pause]…you thought the housing market was getting better.  So did I.  I’ll fill you in on today’s ‘Marketplace.’”  Kai, go take a nap or something.  KR also interviewed a chef who was deriving unusual recipes from IBM’s “Watson.”  Apparently the supercomputer had been programmed to combine like flavors from different geographical regions and this had some potential business applications and was therefore being featured on Marketplace.  The chef’s major achievement so far had been a Butternut Squash BBQ Sauce and KR, over the course of the interview, noted at least three times that he’d tried the sauce and hated it.  “I didn’t care for it, but I have a thirteen-year-old son who did.”  Devastating. 

We were supposed to meet Maya Nathan, our hostess for the night and one of my Bread Loaf School of English friends, at 6pm and she texted me the restaurant’s location at 5.  Wait – wasn’t it 5?  The car clock said it was, but my phone was reading 6.  Oh no!  We’d forgotten about the timezone shift and were supposed to be at the restaurant RIGHT NOW.  Tim booked it to Santa Fe and we showed up only 45 minutes late.  Perfect gentlemen.  Ate Mexican food with Maya and caught up with her.  She was ebullient as usual.  Tim and I bought some wine and headed to the St. John’s campus in Santa Fe where we’d be staying.  Got there and drank the wine and then headed to a little clearing behind a dorm and watched a dramatic sunset over the mountains and the city (SF by the way is from what we saw very little and cute and I could totally imagine living there).  Saw many faces from last year.  Everyone was very friendly and talkative.

Went up on the balcony of the St. John's dorm where we’d be staying and watched a lighting storm off in the distance.  Headed back to Maya’s common room where Maya's friend Tosh (sp?), who had proclaimed just minutes earlier that she HAD to go to bed, showed up with a handle of Bacardi.  No one drank any of it and we just stayed up for a while talking and joking.  Tim slept on a couch and I slept on a blow-up pad of the type we used when camping.  Overall a pretty good sleep.