Vacation Blog #1

My husband and I just returned from a 12-day road trip through Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, California, Oregon, and Idaho, and I had some interesting reflections I wanted to share.

First of all, we witnessed no fewer than five groups of protesters/speakers standing at busy intersections, waving signs. They drew attention to a wide variety of causes—Black Lives Matter, God, mask mandates, abortion rights, and personal privacy. We gave a thumbs-up to a couple of groups, waved to a couple, and pretty much ignored one. After seeing all those people standing near the curb, homemade signs in hand, some of them obviously worn out by the heat of the day, I thought, “How cool is it that here in the United States, we are free to voice our opinions? Maybe we don’t agree on every single issue, but that’s okay. At least we have the option to speak out and offer different viewpoints.” We as Americans are blessed to have that right.

Second, while we navigated several large metropolitan areas that were teeming with humanity, what struck us most were the solitary people we noticed wherever we went. Like the old man sitting in a wheelchair on the edge of a parking lot, a cigarette in his hand and a hot-pink stocking cap on his head, smoking and watching the traffic go by. Or the homeless man sitting in a parking lot next to a shopping cart crammed full of his worldly possessions who thanked us very graciously when we offered him our leftover Chinese meal. Or the large, shambling man in grubby clothes and a hoody, walking near the edge of town with his head down and his hood pulled up. (Pulled-up hoody hoods seem to be the universal symbol for “leave me alone/I don’t want to be seen.”)

Some people made me wonder about what their lives were like. We ate dinner at a restaurant in northern California, and adjacent to our table was a small bar area. A single, skinny man sat on one of the barstools, apparently unaware that he was exposing a good four inches of khaki green underwear to the rest of the diners. At first, we noticed him because he was trying to engage the harried bartender/waitress in conversation, blind, apparently, to the fact that she was extremely busy mixing drinks and hustling back and forth between the bar and the tables and didn’t really seem to want to engage in idle chit-chat with him (although she was unfailingly polite and didn’t blow him off or ignore him). Our interest ratcheted up a notch when a man in his late twenties came into the dining area with a little boy of about eight. The man spoke to the waitress for a moment, then said goodbye to the little boy, parking him on a chair off to one side of the bar. (Apparently the boy’s parents were divorced; possibly the waitress/bartender was his grandmother; probably the restaurant was a safe, neutral space where the man and his ex-wife could exchange their child.) At that point, the man on the barstool stopped chatting up the waitress and turned his attention to the little boy. Now, I’ve worked in public settings for a long time, and my “weirdo meter” can sense wingnuts from a mile away. And that man at the bar made my antennae stand on end. There was something . . . not quite right about him. He desperately wanted to be noticed. Even while he was talking to the waitress, he kept checking over his shoulder to see if any of the diners at nearby tables were listening in on his conversation and perhaps admiring his witty repartee. He asked the little boy how old he was. “Eight.” “My boy’s eleven. He wants a skateboard for his birthday. You got a skateboard?” he asked. I got to wondering: If he had an eleven-year-old son at home, why was he sitting in this restaurant on a Sunday evening all by himself, drinking, trying to strike up conversations with a waitress and an eight-year-old boy? Why didn’t he go home and talk to his family? Or had they caught onto his innate weirdness, too, and now he was on his own? Was he lonely? What was his story?

The following morning, we stopped at a gas station to use the restroom and buy a couple bottles of water. When we got to the cash register, a short, stout woman who vaguely resembled a pug dog took our money and looked nonplussed when we asked if she knew what type of weather we could expect for the day. “I don’t know,” she said. A tall, painfully skinny young man was standing off to one side, dragging a mop in listless swipes across the floor. His entire demeanor communicated tiredness—he wore black jeans and a black hoody, his shoulders were slumped, there were dark bags under his eyes, and his voice sounded like it came from a thousand-year-old, badly depressed soul. “It’s always rainy and overcast in the morning,” he said dully. “Sometimes the sun comes out later.” It was then that I noticed that he had three-inch-long fake fingernails and that they were painted a sad shade of beige. Did he hate his job? I wondered. Did he hate working with the pug dog lady, pushing a mop around and cleaning toilets? Did he ever paint his nails a joyful color or was beige the happiest he could get? If he could get away from there, where would he go and what would he do? How could he achieve “flight”?

An afternoon later, we stopped at a small-town grocery store to pick up lunch supplies from the deli. The clerk behind the counter was young—probably in his early twenties—and exuded a peculiar sense of exasperation at being there and being forced to wait on (dumb) customers. My husband ordered a tub of coleslaw, then it was my turn. “Could I get a half-pound of Waldorf salad, please?” I asked, pointing toward the deli case. “What kind?” he asked, like he was unfamiliar with the term. “Waldorf,” I repeated. “Waldorf? What kinda goofy name is that?” he asked, reaching into the glass case to twist around the sign that was propped in the salad so he could read the label. “It’s named after a famous hotel,” I said, trying to be helpful. “Huh. Well, I hope the hotel is better than this salad,” he said, shaking his head. He slopped a couple spoonsful of salad into a tub, weighed it, and plopped the tub on the counter, clearly OVER IT with the job and us and the awful Waldorf salad. Had he wanted the deli job? Or was it the only job he could get? Did he usually work in, say, the meat department or the bakery? If he had his druthers, what would he really like to do?

A third observation: My husband and I are very fortunate to have the lives that we do. We made reservations for a room at a nice motel at the edge of a mid-sized city, and instead of taking us to the motel via a direct route, the car’s GPS system funneled us through a two-block-long homeless encampment where the curbs were lined with crapped-out motor homes, campers, tents, and cars. And a lot of trash. When we got to the motel, my husband asked the desk clerk if we needed to be concerned for our safety with the encampment literally behind the motel. All those people, she patiently informed us, had lost their homes during the COVID pandemic, and were now forced to live in their cars or campers or motor homes to make ends meet. “A lot of them have jobs,” she said, trying to make the point that these were regular, everyday people, not the lowest dregs of society. “They get up in the morning and go to work. The housing market here is so expensive right now that they can’t afford to live anywhere else.” It was a humbling moment. My husband and I live in a small, mostly rural community. We’ve led insulated lives. We have never lacked for food or clothing or shelter, and we don’t personally know anyone who has lost their home or livelihood due to COVID. We had never fully realized how COVID had altered anyone’s life until we saw the homeless encampment, and then, after talking with the desk cleark, we felt almost ashamed of ourselves for questioning the occupants’ presence there. Obviously, they had enough problems without someone like us worrying that we might catch their “cooties” if we stayed near them. We vowed from that point on to try to be less judgmental and more compassionate.

Observation #4: With the exception of one crabby convenience store clerk and a man who flipped us off when we committed a minor traffic faux pax, every single person we encountered was friendly and helpful. Which made me wonder: The media today makes it seem like we live in a hateful country divided into two camps: Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, red people versus blue people, the Good “Us” versus the Awful “Them.” But no one I encountered acted obviously red or blue; they were all quite nice and maybe not so different from me. Maybe we need to try harder to not lump people into restrictive, pejorative, one-size-fits-all categories. Maybe we need to try harder to see individual trees instead of forests for a change.