| Out Of The Blue |
[Jul. 7th, 2009|04:05 pm] |
Sunday, we checked out of the Comfort Inn.
We'd spent the long weekend battening down the apartment. I threw away the last of the perishables, as it seems the refrigerator could be off for weeks – after that long, even pickles would die. I scoured it (unhappily; if I'd had a place to bring a lot of this stuff it could have been saved), leaving, in the end, a few bottles of beer, a couple bottles of seltzer, and one or two jello snacks that didn't need to be refrigerated, but just tasted better cold. I opened a couple boxes of baking soda and put one in the fridge and one in the freezer.
We disassembled the computer, and boxed up what little jewelry Janet has, and all of the loose electronics, which are few. We packed two week's worth of clothes. We put a box (a large Lego builder's set box) in the front hall for the landlord to put our mail in. We stopped the paper.
Mrs. Professor does our pills into those four-box-by-seven-day cases. We bought half a dozen more, and she did up meds for the next five weeks. Mrs. Professor is clever.
We drove all the impedimenta to a friend's house and put it in her spare room; the photo albums, the computer and peripherals, the stealables, the meds.
Saturday night, we watched the fireworks at the motel. We'd gone to what the motel ads called a brew pub, but it turned out to be the snack bar for a bowling alley. They did have beer, I'll grant you that. I had fried chicken – and they didn't do the thing of making one piece a fraking wing – and the wife had chicken chupacarbras. The beer was drinkable, though I did notice that the "Nut Brown Ale" was described as "a mixture of porter and lager". That's not even ale, for the love of Bacchus.
Most mornings, the breakfast buffet at the motel had a few guests eating at any one time. Sunday morning, it was packed. The line was out the door and back to the elevators. They must have been full up for the Fourth. We heard English, American Southern , Spanish, French, and Italian. The most startling guest was, essentially, Roy Orbison, hair, sunglasses, and all – save that he sat next to us and spoke Italian to his tablemates.
The girl in the electric blue bustier, two sizes too small, was notable as well.
(One morning the family at the next table was some sort of plain folk – the wife and the inbred little girl wore long cotton dresses, and the husband and the two boys wore dark trousers, Sears short sleeved shirts, and 1957 Boys Regular haircuts. (I could not help but notice that I could have stood next to them and been taken for an uncle.) They left, and a girl wearing such short shorts that I feared she'd bend over, and a guy in a ruffled shirt, took their place. "Ah, and here are the fancy people!", I murmured.)
We ate breakfast, packed the car, and waved good-bye to Morrissey Boulevard and the panoply of working-class tourists. We weren't to check in to the new place for a couple of hours, so we tried to get iced coffee and sit in the shade down near Castle Island, but the whole area was packed. Janet said that in 50 years she'd never seen it that bad. The whole causeway out to Ft. Independence was closed off; the first time we went past there was a bad-tempered lady ranger turning people away; the second time they'd backed up the barrier with a piece of equipment and there were two big scowling guy rangers as well.
We gave up and drove west, sipping on our iced coffee. |
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