Tidbits from My Trip

oddest sign: “No Livestock Released” at a Tennessee rest stop, which was something of a disappointment as I’d have liked to see some cows wandering about

oddest sound: in the fancy bathroom of a fancy Charlotte restaurant Elvis singing the “Dixie” portion of An American Trilogy

oddest recurring conversation: about the mother, daughter and toddler grandchildren arrested walking nekkid down Providence Road because God told them to (it wasn’t clear which one God spoke to)

oddest consistency: from North Carolina and back to Memphis, through 8:00 traffic in Charlotte to 5:00 traffic in Memphis, the traffic was always going in the opposite direction

oddest birthday present to Daddy: mine
sweetest reaction to the oddest present: Daddy’s

oddest coincidence: my needing a “Full Service” gas station and looking up, in a city of over two million people, to see such a gas station on the corner

oddest task: sweeping ants off the car with a broom

oddest thought: what if I carried around a tape recorder and asked strangers to sing Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” into the recorder then put it on YouTube—that would be funny

oddest experiment: standing a silver spoon in a glass of almond milk (bought by my mother to conduct such an experiment) to see it the silver would tarnish

oddest newspaper headline: see the nekkid story above

oddest sight: Tex wearing a translucent cone of shame, looking like a doggy satellite dish

oddest on-the-road occurrence: getting hit on in the Waffle House by a man old enough to remember party lines on telephones

oddest new fact: my Daddy and Evangeline were born on the same day, 87 years apart

oddest outfit: the country dress on the 6 foot wooden bear in the front yard two blocks down from my parent’s house, which was weird because I thought the bear was male

oddest smell: the scent of just-baked cake for ten hours in the car thanks to the slice of strawberry cake in the backseat warming in the sun

oddest compliment: “You look like James Dean.”

oddest new sensation: taking a pill with yogurt because I am a lazy girl and I didn’t have any water yet I had a carton of yogurt in front of me and I’d seen my daddy take it that way

oddest sorrow: visiting my 83 year old mother and 88 year old dad and only tearing up when looking at my older sister, thinking, what would I do if anything ever happened to my sister?

here’s to creative synthesis . . .