Miscellany

The last time I stopped at this truck stop I was glad to go again.

It may not have been the scuzziest place I'd ever spent the night next to, but it was in the running.

This morning it was more pleasant. Looks like someone bought the place while I was elsewhere, and they're trying to fix it up. The motel rooms upstairs have been stripped to the walls, and the fixtures in the bathrooms have been mostly removed. (The ones still in place make me understand why...) Lots of signs of the kind of violence that precedes renovation.

Downstairs, the convenience store and the restaurant have that earnest air that seems to come with a new broom used hard. The too-sharp corners and too-uniform colors that mark fresh coats of paint. New shelves in the store, new tables in the restaurant, and not quite enough of either to fill the spaces. You walk in, and your reaction isn't so much “Ah! Excellent!” as “They're trying hard. Hope they make it.”

And I do. Nice people. And the place IS much improved.

*****

A little later, I roll along. Blasting past a backhoe as it lumbers down the road, cell phone firmly pressed to the driver's ear.

Sigh.

*****

Had to stop and do some paperwork. My little book said there was a truck stop at this exit, but I couldn't find it. The only likely-looking candidate was a service station off to my left. Got there and saw a little convenience store, a set of gas pumps, and a teeny-tiny parking lot, with a little two-lane wandering off into farm-country limbo beyond it.

If I'd kept going I might have ended up anywhere. With no place to turn around. So I turned left.

Onto another two-lane to apparently nowhere.

I stopped the truck, kicked in the emergency flashers, and took stock. To my right, a tiny strip-mall, with a tiny parking lot and two tiny driveways to get to it. UPS could get in there, but not a lot else. To my right, a fair-sized church, with a fair-sized parking lot. With a fair number of cars in it.

Still, it was a fair-sized lot. Plenty of room to reverse course there, if I was careful. So I got out and hunted around for the church office. At length I found a desk occupied by your basic nice Southern church secretary. She asked me what she could do for me, and I explained my predicament.

Her eyes got bigger, and her smile did, too. And she said, “Thank you for asking!”

Going by her reaction, I have to assume this has happened before. And that they usually get taken for granted. Kind of embarrassing, really...