It Continues
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
In which lectures continue and chocolate is purchased…
It was Mom’s and Dad’s 31st anniversary. They had dined at Red Lobster on Sunday in advance.
As a continuation of their celebration, their day started off with an earthquake in Sullivan, an hour outside of St. Louis. Collette had driven right through it the previous morning. And naturally, when it had occurred, Joe seemed to be spelunking somewhere with Wally during the rumbling. And what with the intense heat (98 in St. Louis, at least), and the raccoons… they had returned to Rolla.
Meanwhile, Collette prepared for another day of sitting for six hours.
When she had called in the previous night to check on Puck, etc., Rose answered the phone.
“Have a nice time at your hotel,” she said. “See if they give massages there.”
Collette laughed. “This is a Super Eight.”
Back to the same story for the whole day.
Collette pondered the various enigmas of the morning. The faces…
A woman probably in her 30’s. Very tanned, ears pierced in numerous places. Bleach-streaked hair rolled up in a bun via chopstick. Girly green skirt, the sports sandals, and a nondescript multi-colored shirt that she might have saved from junior high. Five young children with starry blonde hair and dark chocolate dark eyes. Collette decided that maybe she had been a farm girl who grew up near an outlet mall. It seemed a possibility, given the current location.
The moderator. Thin pastor’s wife with a high, sort of childish voice, white mohair poncho. Bag of sunflower seeds.
The speaker, also Collette’s instructor (for herself and the other dude in the class) seemed like she could have been Bluebell South’s cousin, in expression and accent. Though she was an Alabaman who grew up not knowing what a bagel was, and planted a Messianic temple with her Jewish husband in Pennsylvania. Friendly drawl. Freckled arms. Leaving for Israel on Friday.
Another woman just come from a pretended Pan-American rescue unit: khaki capris, sandals, olive tank, silver medallion necklace, gray hoodie, boy-cut hair, Diet Pepsi in a can from the 70’s…
Yet another one who surprisingly resembled Kristen Wiig from Saturday Night Live. Collette half expected her to start cracking jokes.
Two other women discussing their concerns over skull-and-crossed-bones emblems… It was that sort of environment…
The other guy in the training class with the large indents in both ears where he might have once had gauges in his younger years…
Some hand-outs, including an ad for a classical college, Rivendell Sanctuary. Collette didn’t know which was more embarrassing: the title of the school, or the fact that she knew from whence the Rivendell reference actually hailed.
But in the end of things, the program was good, and Collette was thankful to see that the general collective of women present were not eccentric regarding their political preferences and tastes and opinions concerning the world, as so many home schooled groups in the past had been prone to do.
Another three-hour course training where the whiteboard was duct-taped to the wall, and their director mentioned once having known a girl who had changed her name to: Rainbow Sunshine.
Back to the hotel. Well, motel, really.
Collette would have liked a jog, some homemade oatmeal cookies, and an Elvis movie. But the first two were currently off-limits. And somehow the idea of Elvis just wouldn’t be the same if watched without the first two as preface, or accompaniment.
But something was still needed for dinner. 1080 calories of lemon pepper chicken would not last for four meals, as much as she would have liked to make it stretch. So out past the Cost Slasher, or some other sort-of-similar thing like that… Collette wasn’t sure it could be entirely trusted. And onto the possibly more reputable, yet no more desirable, Wal-Mart.
(This was not the land of Targets and Dierberg’s, needless to say…)
Deli-style turkey.
1 large Hershey’s bar to celebrate the end of the week’s seminars.
And cinnamon gum to help get through the day.
Word from home…
Puck and Henri’s little girl had filled the children’s swimming pool ‘with mud pies’, as Puck had announced to her over the phone.