Perkins #2432

I am sitting at a Perkins, a now-familiar restaurant chain kind of like Denny's; this one in Helena, Montana.

Behind me I hear a couple talking. "I woke up in a hospital bed, and I wasn't supposed to be there. It was supposed to be a day surgery. I woke up and didn't know what had happened." I want to turn around, to talk to this woman, to say that I know & I understand & put my arms around her and grieve what we have lost and gained.

"Why are you frowning?" Renee breaks my concentration. I tell her what the woman has said.

"You know, sometimes it just..."
"--sometimes it just gets to you." She understands, because she almost died once, too.
"Does it still get to you?" I hope she says no, that in a couple of years this will stop bothering me. She's 13 years out, more than enough time to get over it.
"Yes, sometimes it still does." My eyes well up. This was not what I wanted to hear. She goes on about life, and death, and how near-death changes your life. I watch the people over her shoulder. A middle aged man and woman sit across from the woman's parents: small wrinkled man on oxygen and frail woman with a placid, slightly confused look of dementia.
"But I never wanted the plaque at the end of my career. I wanted more. And less," Donna Renee is saying.

A skinny, hunched teenager sits in the corner with his cute round girlfriend.

The waitress comes to take our order. She clears and delivers and writes and repeats mechanically, like she is doing this job for someone else's sake. Her face is tanned and carved and maybe a little bit angry, like she did not choose this life for herself. I wonder if she's a single mother, or if she too has elderly parents at home, or maybe she's just having a bad day.

Four bikers walk in, with chaps and Harley shirts and vests and bandanas on their heads. They are two couples--one in their 40's, the other maybe in their late 50's or 60's. The old oxygen man glares openly at them, full of expired prejudices about rowdy Hell's Angels, I suppose. The couples sit down to the left of us, under a shelf of teapots and dusty fake flowers laced with ribbons and pearls, and a doiley-crocheted doll's hat. The bikers talk quietly and gently. One of the men puts on his reading glasses to skim the menu. Oxygen-man still glares. His daughter ties a bandana over his wife's hair and tries to coax her to the edge of the bench to make her stand.

The teens have not stopped touching each other since they sat down--fingers entwined, or hair brushed gently or playful taps and grins. She looks alternately concerned and reassured. I can't hear what they're saying, but he leans over the table for a peck. She seems pleased.

"And I asked for my doctor, and they said he'd gone home. I told them I needed someone to talk to, someone to explain what had gone wrong--"
"No plaque to gather dust. Makes you want to buy a motorcycle and just ride away--"
"Come on mom, scoot over, so we can go. Mom, MOM, you have to scoot over. Scoot over--"

The waitress lays down the check.
"Thank you so much for lunch," we say.
"Yep," she says and is gone.

Missionaries of the Question.

I feel sluggish, like I've been eating junk food and sugar for days, with no nutrients. That's what it feels like to be called to a purpose, then to be stuck playing the tourist. It's been two days since we had an interview. Not that long--last summer we'd go several days between them. But now we're more experienced, and focused. This isn't a vacation. This isn't about the scenery. We're missionaries of the question. The interviews, on camera or off, propel us. It's the people & their eyes & their beliefs. It's questions and answers that feed us. Give us this day our daily bread...

Confessions

OK, you might as well know this about me. I grew up with some very strange beliefs. For instance, I thought my family had lived on the moon before I was born. It was an honest mistake: they'd lived on Moon Street, and had a land rover (which I mixed up with "moon rover"), and my big brother's first word was apparently "moon." So, like I said, it was an honest mistake--anybody could have made it. I also believed for years that my mother had once served us frog legs. This was not a honest mistake. This was a joke that my above-mentioned brother made when I asked what we were having for dinner. The only trouble was that I didn't find out that we'd eaten chicken that night until I was 26 years old. I also blame him for my erroneous 2nd-grade belief that when you're on a ski lift and there's a skier below you, you're supposed to click your skis together to let the people know you're there. Luckily, this belief that didn't last long: as soon as I saw white powder from my Elans dust the guy below us, I realized that he'd set me up.

I tell you all of this in preparation for this confession: As a little girl, I thought Mt Rushmore was a natural phenomenon.

OK, there--I've said it. But in my defense, I did grow up in New Mexico, near "Battleship Rock" and "Camel Rock" and a bunch of other rocks that looked like what they were named for. So I thought that it was possible that somehow wind and rain and time had carved a mountain into remarkable likenesses of 4 of our presidents. (Let me remind you that I was VERY young, and I'm much more sophisticated now.) Now, let me declare to anyone still in doubt: I have been to Mt Rushmore, I have seen a bust of its sculptor, Gutzon Borglum. No doubt, it is man-made.

Today we're off to Montana. I've heard there's this 210 year-old man there...

The telling

Yesterday, we accidentally shared with a group of wonderful people at a church here in Sioux Falls. The church had a "talk-back" session with the pastor after the sermon. Sounded like our kind of thing, so we filed into the little room and sat down on the brown tweed couch. Soon Barb and her husband, first time visitors, sat next to me. Paul came in, toting his yearning and his questions. His elegant wife sat next to him, exuding a peaceful wisdom. They all came--Claire the NPR fan, and Joe the Pastor and sassy teacher and the men filtered in. We discussed the sermon and heard bits of their lives through it. We told bits of our lives too, and the lives of the people we talk to everyday.

Sometimes, even we don't get the story until we say it out loud. We live these stories; we put on these people and carry them around with us. But it takes the telling to make them three dimensional. In the synthesis and the story, we remember and discover what we're doing out here. We stumble on unexpected tears, and struggle to find the perfect words to make people feel and experience what we see. We hear the themes and the heartaches and the joys in the telling.

Sometimes I worry because our stories are such a sliver. It is always about just one topic or just one boy or just one town. I wonder if the listeners think that what they hear is all it is--I hope not. Yesterday, the topic was justice, and the stories we brought we justice stories. Somedays, it's family; other days, searching. I don't know what tomorrow will be. Won't know until it's told.