It is what it is

I walked into a Starbucks in Orlando, November of 2023. I travel a lot; when I go to Orlando I go to Disney World, and after I go to Disney World I go to Starbucks to unwind. The place was quite chaotic; a barista appeared to be saving an old woman's life. She had perhaps collapsed of a heart attack, and he, the barista, was taking charge of the situation. My guess was that he was African, based on his appearance and his British accent; the important thing was that he had the authority of a doctor who knew what he was doing; everyone else just gave him room and brought him whatever he asked for, like a wet cloth or soft towel.

The other barista, a young, pretty girl, was therefore left with a backlog of orders and trying to get everyone's order prepared; when I commented on how busy it was, she just said, "It is what it is" and kept working.

I'd always hated that phrase, I thought, though I was happy that she'd gotten me my large coffee relatively quickly and that I'd beaten the long line that was developing behind me. I thought of my long day at Disney World. I'd skipped most of the rides as usual; I go to watch the people. As an immigrant from Ireland, I find it an incredible display of everything America is or wants to be, and it's a complete indulgence in fantasy. But then, Starbucks itself is very American too, with its three-dollar coffees and whipped-cream drinks.

I took my plain coffee over into the corner behind a display case and settled in a table back there. A couple of people behind me were having a serious discussion of some kind, and right away it was clear they were from Disney. You can't escape Disney in this town, I thought as I sipped my coffee, but I was actually interested in eavesdropping on their conversation, so I did. In the corner, the one barista appeared to have the situation under control. The place was crowded and I'd got one of the last tables. But there was no way I could not hear this conversation behind me.

The older man, with some authority and self-assurance, was rattling off a list of recent Disney movie failures. Lightyear, Elemental, The Little Mermaid, Strange World: all had flopped, and this guy appeared to know how badly and how their poor performance had matched up to Disney's expectations, or at least the stockholders' expectations.

Now while I was listening to this guy go on about movie failures, a little boy of about four, apparently named Sam, was causing all kinds of trouble while his mother, or a woman who appeared to be his mother, called at him from across the room. At this moment he was pulling napkins out of the napkin-holder one at a time and letting them float gently toward the floor. "Sam! You stop that!" she'd say from across the room, but then she'd go back to talking to whoever she was busy talking to.

All these people were oblivious to the drama unfolding over in the other corner of the store, with the older lady, who had perhaps had a heart attack and who now appeared to be saved. The barista had known what he was doing, apparently; the 911 people, as I call them, had now arrived and were taking her by stretcher out the door on that side of the store. Good job, barista! He took a look at the long line snaking out the store to the main doorway, and apologized to the young girl who was still making some specialty drink. It was just them and this very crowded coffee shop.

The discussion of the two Disney employees turned to what had gone wrong and what could be done about it. Why had these movies flopped so spectacularly? One generally accepted theory was that the public was mad because Disney had bucked Governor DeSantis' efforts to control what children saw; that in taking a public stand against this kind of control they were saying that they would do what they wanted and not buckle under to conservative censorship. Another theory was that the increasing politicization of everything meant that even the appearance of a gay character in one of their movies now was taking a stand against the mainstream conservative desire to shield children from the message that gay was ok.

I was interested in how the younger person in the conversation, who could probably be an applicant for some job in the film-making part of the company, hedged and gave answers that didn't reveal too much of what he really thought. It was as if he was trying to get the job from the older man, but had to figure out how to align with the older man's philosophy first. But the older man seemed to be on both sides of the social questions, and at the same tiime more focused more on the bottom line.

I had only a large coffee, no whipped cream, no chocolate, no nothing, so I sipped it slowly and kept listening. At the same time I watched Sam make a little tent pile with the stirring sticks, I listened to the Disney people continue their interview. Actually it was news to me about these movies and, since Disney is King in this town I figured that anything I could learn would probably on some level be helpful. But the coffee shop now had a new disruption: two angry men charged in past the line and started shouting at the baristas. "How can you support Palestinians? They broke through Israel's border and killed 1400 people! What are you doing? This is an outrage!"

Apparently the Starbucks employee union had come out in favor of Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas War, and were one of the only, if not only, supporters of Palestinians at this point in the war; thus they were the most visible target for strongly pro-Israeli protesters. These two angry men did not appear to be Israeli, or even Jewish, though one never knows, and they felt strongly enough about it that they could shout even in a busy coffee shop, disrupting business and putting everyone on edge. Even Sam gave up his business with the sticks, and the two Disney guys behind me paused for a few minutes to listen to their angry yelling. We were all trying to figure out how they could be so angry at hapless baristas. What did they want? Were they going to commit violence?

The two poor baristas got very upset. The young woman was flustered and became almost unable to make a cappucino. I could tell she knew very little about the Israel-Hamas war, but was more upset about the jarring atmosphere these two angry men caused by their shouting. The one who had just saved the old woman's life, however, was much more active in trying to talk his way out of this confrontation. He explained to them that the union did not necessarily represent every barista's view and that baristas sometimes had to go along with the majority just like everyone else. I was grateful that it didn't appear to be heading toward violence. The two angry men, after making their feelings clearly known and turning the entire coffee shop into a confrontation over the war, finally left in a huff saying that Starbucks wouldn't be getting much of their business for a while.

I had an odd thought when they said that. Chances are, I thought, that they would never really come here for a coffee anyway. Three quarters of the world never goes to a Starbucks ever, and they were probably the same way. It was like my day at Disney World in a way; I always consider Disney World a marvel, quintessentially American, and it is, yet a wide swath of America would never go there, or would never be able to afford it. To say you're going to boycott a place that you never go to anyway isn't saying much, but I could tell the baristas weren't happy about that loud recrimination in their small coffee shop.

The African barista had now come over to deal with Sam, who was somewhat relentless in disrupting the little table of coffee extras: caps, stirrers, creamer, little packets of sugar. He'd ransacked the place, in his own four-year-old way. His mother was apologetic, but she was a little late; he'd already done his damage. And she'd gotten what, probably her only break all morning. But the African barista was more than patient. He had saved a life, diffused a political crisis, and now put a young hooligan back in the care of his mother, all in the course of ten minutes. I finally talked to him a little, and told him that I admired his skill in managing that older woman who'd had a heart attack, in getting 911 help and getting her out of here as quickly as possible, as minutes count in such situations. I made a little comment about the mother's neglect, although she'd at least tried, but he didn't want to say anything bad about the mother, saying only "it is what it is," a kind of wry commentary that he'd probably picked up from the other barista.

It turns out he actually was a doctor in his home country, which may have been Eritrea or something, and this was the best job he could get in Orlando or anywhere in the US. He didn't have much time to talk. But he had children at home, and he knew that there wasn't much use in exploding at them or getting overly angry at what to them was just a natural process of discovery.

The two guys behind me had widened their discussion to include all of Disney. The filmmaking part of it and Disney World were only part of a huge corporation that had a lot of pressure on it to succeed. Even Disney World had had trouble with the pandemic and all, and I probably could have jumped into the conversation at this point, because I'd seen Disney World's response to the pandemic and knew that things weren't easy over there. There's nothing worse than too many Mickeys and not enough kids, or kids who are afraid to pose for a picture with any of the dressed-up characters all around.

Much to my surprise, just before I left, the older guy announced that the younger guy had the job if he wanted it. What job, exactly, I had no idea, because I'd missed parts of their conversation, but it was now clear that this was an interview. The younger guy, nervous and clearly with second thoughts, took it but with a little hesitation. I wondered what I would do if I were offered a job at Disney - a once in a lifetime experience, I'm sure. I was doing well with what I had, but a day off, especially one surrounded by Mickeys and Goofys, always made me reflect a little.

I could just give it all up and go back to Ireland, I thought, as I drained my cup, threw it away, and prepared to leave. But I actually found the African guy somewhat inspirational. This place must be really different from what he was used to. He seemed to have the patience and strength to deal with whatever came his way. I could only hope I could learn from that, as I gathered my things and jumped back into the world.

Now, the last disaster happened: A woman spilled an entire large drink, whipped cream and all, on the floor by the door. She was nearly hysterical and left to find some way to clean it up. The baristas, at the edge of their patience now, assured her and said it would all work out. The mother was trying to get Sam to walk around it, as they were leaving too, but Sam was somewhat fascinated with how the whipped cream floated on the spilled coffee. Finally, though, he gave up looking at it, shrugged his shoulders, and said, "it is what it is!"

Harvardinates

John Leverett, first secular President of Harvard (1708-1724), used Harvardinates (sons of Harvard), instead of Sons of the Prophets, to refer to Harvard alumni. That was his way of saying, we educate all men, not just divinity students (yes it was boys only at that time). This is the story of opening up Harvard, and all higher education in North America, to a wider audience - which is still a trend in progress.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CND89PZS

Lately I've been writing about Disney World a lot. In fact I have about ten stories finished - you can read three or four of them below - and hope to have about twenty before I call it a book.

The thing is, I've never been there. The times I was in Florida, I never had the money, or the time, and in spite of having ten children, same - never had a few thousand to drop.

But this doesn't seem to be a problem. I can put almost anything into Google and get reams of information about it. It's almost like you can walk through a door into an alternate universe. All of a sudden, Mickey and Minnie are real, and there's a host of other characters. Thousands of employees will tell you what it was like to work there. Usually they are able to explain how the Disney culture is different from the culture around.

Disney is extremely well marketed to the upper-middle class American entertainment needs. It has managed to stay at the top of its game for fifty years and, in spite of raising its prices astronomically at every turn, keeps the park full and the money rolling in. Their marketing is based on perpetuating the "happiest place on earth" idea and quickly eliminating anything that might tarnish that image. I'm not down on them for squashing people's right to say something negative - they're not after me now, for example - I think it's part of good marketing. If employees agreed not to say anything negative, hold them to it. What's interesting to me is the fantasy/reality line - that is, when people genuinely get confused about what's real and what's not, and Disney does nothing or doesn't quite know how to deal with the problem. There are a lot of people, for example, who stalk or fall in love with the Disney characters. Not the people who play them, the characters. There are people who are living the fantasy. I could in fact use my book to explore schizophrenia and why it is that some people just slip into a fantasy world, since the real one is putting too much pressure on them.

Instead I am mostly using it to explore the American family - husband, wife, two kids - in all its glory. Maybe I'll do the other kinds of families too, step-families, large families, no-kid families, I'm not sure how. In the modern world we don't really have much of the upper middle class, two-kid families anymore, so in a sense I'm investigating what's left of them. Who actually goes to Disney World? What happens when they get there? In what ways to the various folk tales that this whole world is built around, affect their experience?

It's a rich vein for a book, lots here. You might be mad at me for writing about some place I haven't even set foot in. But in fact I've read and read about it. I avoid some areas of it; there is no way I can cover it all. And within it are entire worlds - each movie, for example, has its own entire culture, with its characters represented and played out somewhere within WDW - which makes me even more of an interloper, since I can't possibly know them all.

Ah but that's who I am. This is as close as I'll get to the place.

There's a house across the street from the abatement that we use to get out of our garage and onto the street, such that, as we face the street for the first time when leaving our house, that house is right there in front of us. It's white, old, and traditional, and has a small front porch. When we moved here there was a chair on that porch and a guy would be sitting in it every once in a while.

There were a couple of break-ins in our garage that October, as we were still moving in, got covid, and were a little unorganized, and I had failed to lock the garage and even left the window open enough for someone to crawl in after removing the screen. I kicked myself and vowed to keep the garage locked from then on, a vow I have had trouble keeping. But soon after, the guy in that white house was arrested for breaking in to other houses around town and I became convinced that he was responsible for our break-ins too. I peered over at that house, now empty, and the chair on the porch, but restrained myself from just marching over there and fishing through whatever he had. Instead I wrote a letter to the police saying I'm pretty sure he would have X, Y & Z and let me know if you find these among his stolen goods. They never even responded.

The guy who moved in after him had New Mexico license plates on his car, but kept to himself pretty much, and lived there right up until this last August. I kept meaning to walk over and grill him about New Mexico, as we'd moved here from New Mexico also, but I never did, and he was gone before I could. In September a black family moved in with two small children in diapers, who would be out there when the mother was mowing the lawn. The chair was put on the curb about two weeks ago.

It was an old leather reclining chair with a couple holes in the leather, and as I drove onto the street I'd look at it and wonder if we could use it anywhere. I hate seeing old furniture go out to the dump if there's any possible use for it. So I said that to this kid who has been staying with us. His family lives in extreme poverty; his sister is pregnant with a baby and in general he was having trouble, so we just let him stay with us. What I told him was, in general I like to save chairs like that although my wife is not so crazy about that; it looks like maybe you boys could use that chair somewhere, in the attic if nowhere else.

Well, he and my son hauled in the chair, and in the process, found a $100 bill in it. It was the kid who found it, apparently, not my son. Without thinking I told him, I'd probably return it to that family, them being a family and all, but you found it, you can do what you want.

Later it occurred to me that chances were pretty good the family knew nothing about the hundred dollar bill. In fact the kid from New Mexico probably knew nothing about it either. I think in its own way it was what was left of our stuff, coming back to us.

I think the kid is using it, a bit at a time, for his sister's baby and his own needs. First he has to cash it; nobody believes him that he just found it. But that will resolve itself in time. I meant it when I said, it was his to do with as he wanted. It was a somewhat privileged outlook of mine to be able to say, return it, you can always get more money. I could always get more money, but in his shoes, I'd have a harder time returning it. And the other aspects of the back story didn't really fall into place for me until later. When I said that, I'd only been thinking of the family.

Slapping a Mickey

 

I was working the midnight shift at Disney - we started painting when the park closed, and worked until morning - we painted the wooden frames that the rides were built on, and that kind of thing, but we got out there almost every night. I was drinking heavily - that seems to go with painting - I drank before I went to work, a little during work, and then more in the morning when I finished. It wasn't related to Disney; actually I liked Disney. It was more related to a woman who had caused me serious problems.

So often I'd hit these bars that Disney people frequented, and I'd go to them at dinnertime, about when I woke up, and I'd have some dinner and start drinking before I even went to work in the evening. I was just waking up, but I'd see a lot. On this one night I ran into my friend, Beth, who was also a heavy drinker. She invited me to sit down with her and her friend Carol, who was sitting with her. They were both about my age, mid thirties. I due to my devastated confidence was not in the market for a relationship really, but I always liked female company and these two were at least lively and interesting. Both worked for Disney.

I liked my job painting structures at Disney; in the early mornings, when the sun came up and I was done painting, the castles and the fairyland kinds of things glowed in the sun, and I felt the magic. It was my favorite time of day, about five in the morning, and they were just getting ready, getting everything clean and full and prepared; we were putting away tarps and work equipment, and it all looked beautiful. I worked hard, and they paid me adequately. I had no illusions; I knew that if they could pay me a dollar less, they would. But I was one of the few people I knew who defended Disney and felt good about it. These bars were full of people who had fallen out of the dream, who were experiencing the other end of it.

Beth, for example, worked in one of the executive offices by day. I could often envision her in her professional suit, and high heels, an icy stare as she told people they were laid off or were having their salary reduced. Her entire job was to save Disney money somehow, or earn Disney more, to help the bottom line and impress the stockholders. If they could charge an extra dollar for parking, they would. If they could send people out selling parkas the minute it rained, they would, and they would charge whatever they could get. They knew full well that these people were on vacation and didn't feel like pinching pennies. At night she was a serious drinker; that's what we had in common. She wasn't really my type, though I liked her, but we both drank seriously, while people like Carol would slow down so as to come out at the end of the night still knowing who she was, if not still able to drive.

Beth introduced Carol as a woman who liked to slap a Mickey every chance she could get. "Slap a Mickey?" I asked. "I thought the expression was 'Slip a Mickey.'

"It is," Beth said. "Slipping a Mickey is giving someone a pill, usually in their drink, to put them asleep so you can take advantage of them. We have that problem too; in fact, this very bar probably has that problem. But Carol likes to slap a Mickey. You know those Mickeys that run around the park? She likes to slap them."

Carol laughed a little. She was prettier than Beth, but probably still not my type; it was too soon to say. I liked her. She was a character actor; she played one of the Seven Dwarves. We talked about the way a lot of the character actors were stalked. She'd been stalked one time by a woman who didn't know she was a woman, inside her Bashful costume. If you're a good enough actor, she said, they see you as Bashful and not as a person in a Bashful costume. The Mickeys have it worse, she said.

"So many people have been in love with Mickey, forever, since long before they came to Disney, and they come here, and things aren't that great, and they still want that fantasy, that magic. So they go after a Mickey. And they get fixated on him."

"So what's this about slapping a Mickey?"

"Well, the Mickeys around here are either little people or women, because they have to be small to be Mickeys. I know most of them. If they're men, I warn them, they get fresh with me, or something like that, I'll slap them, I don't care if they''re a painter or if they're Walt Disney himself. But I get the most pleasure out of slapping Mickeys. That's why she (poking Beth) is teasing me. I do it a lot. It's most fun when they are in their costume, but of course that won't happen here." Costumes were not to be worn outside of the job itself, so we didn't expect to see them in the bar, though it was known to happen.

A little while after she said this, we were actually joined at our table by a Mickey. His name was Jim, and he was a friend of Carol's. He was out of costume, of course; this was a bar. But they both knew he was a Mickey, and even teased him for it, and he vouched that, yes, Carol had slapped him more than once, in costume and out of it. It's just the way she is, he said, and it never hurts. It reminds you to wake up from the dream. This is not a fantasy, looking serious and banging his beer glass on the table a little.

Jim was interested in the politics of Disney, which was so large, so expansive, that it was actually separate from the state of Florida in some ways and was able to make some of its own rules. Sometimes these rules went against the state of Florida or made people mad in some ways so there was always a kind of push and pull going on. Of course in a bar you're only going to get the more colorful aspects of the story, and not necessarily entirely accurate all the time, but that's where Beth came in. She worked in the executive offices; she knew the truth, usually. Jim and Carol, and I, would talk from a worker's perspective. But Beth knew a lot of things we didn't.

Some time passed, and the bar was lively; I knew it would be my time to go to work very soon. The place was colorful, and was getting more crowded; there were symbols of Florida and Disney on the walls and they'd turned on the neon signs once it got dark outside.

From the corner of my eye, way over on the other side of the bar, I saw something very strange and scary. A woman had gone to the restroom, and in her absence, a man dropped something in her drink. His action was furtive and unseen by most people in the bar. It was only because of our seat in the corner, and the fact that I was facing toward him, that I happened to catch this. I was shocked but as I replayed it in my mind I was sure that that's what I'd seen. Slipping a Mickey! His victim came back and sat down, and he began pressuring her to finish the drink, so they could go. I couldn't even hear him, because I was so far away and the place was noisy, but I knew that was what was happening. I alerted Beth, Carol and Jim to what I'd seen.

Beth was deeply disturbed by what I said, and, looking over at them, she decided to walk over and mix in. If that's what it was, she'd find out pretty quickly. Meanwhile I saw something else that disturbed me greatly: over in the other corner of the place, my ex was being courted by some man who also was rather unsavory. 

It turned out later that he was one of several Captain Jack Sparrows in the park; lots of women hit on him, but my ex was one of them, and so it was possible they had a thing together. This of course made me mad, but what could I do? If a woman wants to go after a pirate captain instead of a set-painter, it's a free country.

There was nothing I could do about that, except to have another drink, which I did, as I watched the scene with Beth and the couple play out. Beth had started talking to the couple right as the man was trying to get the woman to finish her drink and leave. Of course he wanted this woman out of there as soon as possible and before the drug took effect. But Beth knew this, or at least suspected it, and her objective was to stall. Beth was winning; she was an executive; she was a step ahead of him. He was angry now at something she said. The woman had not entirely finished her drink though she'd probably had enough of it for the drug to take effect. Sure enough, I could see the woman begin to lose her bearings, gradually. Beth and the man were still arguing.

I was glad to be diverted, because I didn't want to watch what was happening in the other corner of the bar, where my ex could do whatever she wished and there wasn't much I could do about it.

But right at the table in front of me, another diversion. Jim made a comment about females playing male characters like Bashful, and Carol slapped him. She didn't slap him hard enough to hurt, but she slapped him hard enough to get people at nearby tables to look at us. "You slapped a Mickey!" I said, happy to see what they'd been talking about earlier.

"Doesn't count!" she said. "He's not in costume!"

I laughed again. But two police, a male and female, had entered the bar and were walking over to the table where Beth had stalled the man and woman. The woman was now slumped over, asleep; they'd have to carry her out. Better them, the police, than the man who had drugged her. They were questioning him and getting ready to arrest him. I could have been a witness that he'd spiked her drink, but it wasn't necessary; everyone could see it now.

I was proud of myself, having almost accidentally gotten a criminal like that put away. But I had no time to glory in my success; I had to go to work.


Note: This story is part of a collection I now call Slapping a Mickey: & 20(?) short stories from the House of Mouse - the title, of course, is tentative, as is the final number of stories, but you get the idea. This one still needs some work - I'm not happy about the undeveloped ex, for example, and I might add a stalker. There will be some tinkering. But as the first story of the collection, it's very important that it set the tone, and give an overall view of Disney. I'm still working on that too.

The baby was found in the middle of a battlefield somewhere in Virginia during the Civil War. After the battle, there were dead and injured soldiers all over the place, with discarded muskets that had to be checked and gathered up. But they found this baby in a basket crying, and she had apparently been left there by someone figuring that the authorities would gather her up and take care of her.

They did that, though it took them a while and she went a few days without proper care. By the time she found a loving home, it had been a couple of weeks, but the home she ended up in seemed to work for her and she grew up in a farm family in western Virginia for the next fifteen years.

Nowadays DNA testing would tell you exactly where she came from and who had put her there in that battlefield, but in this case we don't know so we just have to take their word for it that this was what happened.

Meg was a poor girl who lived about five miles from the battlefield. She had been married less than a year when the war came through and her husband, Caleb, went off to fight it on the Confederate side. He was not actually so enthusiastic about the Confederate side itself, but his friends had all gone and had pressured him to go with them, and to stay home would make it seem like he was a deserter or traitor.

But, since they were farmers, things began to go downhill for Meg right away, especially when the new baby came. A local woman had come to help with the delivery, but Meg's mother had died before the baby was born, so she really had no source of support at home. She had two brothers who had gone off to fight as well, but she had no sisters and nobody to ask for help or to move in with. She ate up the food she got from her mother's house, but her mother didn't own that house and the owners were glad to get it back. She tried hiring herself out in the community but with the baby that became harder. Pretty soon she was hungry.

When the war swept through the area she knew that the local boys were using the old field out past the river, but the northern side knew that too and attacked them right there. Meg was hiding in the woods when it happened. She had taken the baby out to the river not knowing what to do, and they were both hungry, the baby crying and Meg crying inside. She couldn't take it anymore. When the battle was over, and both sides had retreated in different directions, she set the baby in the middle of the field and walked home.

Her plan was to go out west somewhere where nobody would know her, but she clung to the hope that Caleb somehow would come back from the war. Instead of leaving the area - she had no money for a bus ticket anyway - she found her way to Charlottesville and worked as a waitress in a small restaurant. The restaurant owner gave her a room to live in.

The war finally ended and things got back to normal to some degree, but Caleb never came home. Sometimes he would appear in her dreams; she would be in the woods, peering out at the battle, and somebody would kill him, or he would kill someone, or someone would come chasing after her and the baby. She would wake up in a cold sweat screaming.

She had an old friend, Esther, in the town she had left, and Esther had promised to inform her if Caleb ever came back to that town looking for her. The problem really was that Esther might not have known, if he DID come back. Esther worked in a bakery, and a lot of people came through the bakery, but would Caleb have come there looking for her? Not many people had known Meg, as she'd lived out in the country; few knew that she'd married; even fewer knew that she'd been pregnant. The war had disrupted everything.

One day a man came into her restaurant and, to make a long story short, he ended up proposing to her. He lived out in the country, in fact not that far from where she had been. He did not know her, or Caleb, or her back story before he walked into that restaurant. He was a horse dealer and was fairly successful. She agreed to marry him and moved with him out to his place in the country. She eventually told him about the baby and about Caleb. The war had disrupted lots of marriages, though. It was not unusual for people to be starting over.

So she was living with this horse dealer, Alvin, and had married him and was now pregnant with his child, and was back in her original town doing an errand. She stopped in on Esther, who told her that Caleb was back. Caleb had come to the bakery two days earlier, and had enquired about Meg, and Esther had told him that Meg had moved to Charlottesville. Esther knew that something was up with Alvin but omitted that from the story so as not to make Caleb mad. But Meg was shocked, and asked Esther what took Caleb so long to come back home. She'd thought he was dead.

Well, they had sent him off to fight in Georgia, and he'd been captured, and when they released him he had no money, and it was this kind of story, The Confederate Army had just kind of fallen apart at the end there, and was unable to even get him home to where he was from.

Just as Esther was relating Caleb's story to Meg, there in the bakery on a clear fall morning, Caleb walked into the bakery. He and Meg recognized each other instantly. He walked up very close to her, but did not reach out to hold her. She filled up with the stress of everything that had happened: the hunger, the giving up of the farm, the abandonment of the baby; she had not forgotten any of it. She told him there was a baby and the baby was in the area somewhere. He slapped her hard across the face and ran out of the bakery.

He was never seen in the town again, and this was lucky for her, because she now had another baby to worry about, and she didn't really want to get Alvin involved. She stopped in at Esther's bakery about once a month and asked every time about Caleb, but Caleb had apparently left town and was not pursuing the issue.

About three years after that incident, she was in the bakery when a farm family of four, mother and three children, came in. The youngest child was about five and had the distinct look of Meg and Caleb both. She was sure that this was her child. She watched the child carefully, and the child noticed her, too, but she was busy taking care of her new toddler, and they didn't really have time to talk.

Caleb was killed in a gunfight in Colorado; he'd robbed a train in Missouri and was by then an outlaw. He was still angry about his wife and had somehow sensed that she'd remarried and he'd lost her. He'd been injured in the war and also knew he'd never be able to keep up the farm, or at least not for long. He was better off just using the gun for what it was for, and run that out until the end, which he did. He spoke her name as he was dying, on the barrom floor in Colorado, but nobody knew any Meg and they buried him out in the wash behind the bar. Years later genealogists came looking for the parents of the young girl, as she'd grown up and had eight children, but could find no evidence of who her birth parents were, and had to wait for the possibility that DNA testing might uncover the truth.

I hitchhiked all the way out to Santa Monica one time to see a girl, but she wasn't there when I got there, and I ended up walking along the pier and experiencing the ocean a little before I went home. She was in Northern California somewhere, so I decided to go up there, but I knew I'd have trouble finding her up there, and I didn't, and had to turn around and come home. Hitchhiking all the way.

I remember some breakfast joint in Arizona where a guy offered me a breakfast and I took it. I also remember meeting a folk legend in Carmel, or at least being told that a guy I saw was one. It was Ramblin' Jack Elliot, I believe, but I sometimes confuse different trips. On one trip I saw Big Sur and almost stayed a while. But once I missed out on the girl, I'd gotten homesick and just wanted to go home.

Phones were bad those days. I didn't have one, and didn't know her mother's number, and she was staying at her mother's in Santa Monica, though not at that moment. Thus I had gone a long way for nothing. Santa Monica seemed to have very eerie light as the sunset came down over the ocean and there were shadows on all the light-colored houses. Cars all had their windows shut in spite of the beautiful weather. There was no interaction among people in the street.

The ocean, of course, was awesome. Waves lapped against the beach and I imagined some of the water had made the trip from Asia just to come up on this shore at this moment. I looked for bottles with notes in them. Not many people were out there with me, but there were a few. You would think a beach would be a popular park in a crowded city with traffic choked everywhere. There is, after all, a wide expanse; a breeze; fresh air; nice sand; room to wave one's arms. Freedom. Yet within a few minutes I decided to get on my way.

There was some charm to the place. People were nice, and gave me rides. I didn't stay that much longer than I wanted to. I felt a cultural gulf that is hard to describe. We are, after all, the same people. It shouldn't be all that different.