The Best Bait-and-Switch Culture Ever!

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We’re in a hotel room in Durham, NC, an old conference center with few guests right now. The night receptionist, Monica, was sweet and warm and welcoming and inquisitive about who we are and what we were up to, The Best Christmas Receptionist Ever! The room is clean and the two queen beds are not too soft. There’s plenty of really hot water. It’s very quiet. It’s The Best Christmas Hotel Room Ever!, or close enough for government work.

The one minus we’ve encountered here is the coffee. Years ago we realized that calling hotel coffee “coffee” was an insult to actual coffee, and so have since called it Hot Brown Liquid, or HBL for short. The coffee here is, without question, The Worst Christmas HBL Ever! But otherwise, this is a good place to hang out for a day or three while the Three Wise Mechanics bring gifts of joy, transmission fluid, and experience to Betty’s beleaguered engine.

We enjoyed (etymologically speaking, it put joy into us) a nice, long visit yesterday morning with Andy and Stacy and Blake and Cameron. The Jumping-on-Colors game was good for some laughs, as was the Talking Hand. Sally put on her engineers cap and talked radiant heating systems with Andy. Stacy and I spoke about Brer Elon’s Twitter Adventure, and then Sally joined in. It was, we might say, The Best Christmas Family Visit Ever!, though it seems unfair to sum it up with yet another cheap joke, or to compare it with other visits at other times and with other portions of our families. Soon enough, though, Blake had to leave for his 1:00 PM curtain call, and we had to return to Doug’s Air BnB (which is, as you may have guessed, The Best Christmas Air BnB Ever!) to shower, do a quick load of laundry, and pack up.

On the way out of Blue Heron Farm, and stopping to check the kids’ mailbox for a package we were expecting, we met up with some old comrades, people with whom we shared a community in a former chapter of our life together, some of whom go way back with Sally to their California days, when they were all fresh and young. First there were two old friends. And then another arrived. And then another. And we ended up parked there in the middle of the road, talking, for a good 45 minutes or so, a meet-up marked with both some very sweet connection on the one hand, and some challenging reminders of why we moved to Montana on the other. A bit of The Best! and The Worst! all rolled into one, I suppose.

We drove to the Air BnB, then left late afternoon to meet Doug at a nearby restaurant, Mi Cancun, which served us The Best Christmas Guacamole Ever! and plenty more. From there, the three of us made our way to the theater in Pittsboro, to see the last performance of the play that brought us here, and the last ever performance this theater group would ever have in this building, since they are moving to new digs in the spring. Once again we sat and watched and applauded and cheered as these brave and energetic and enthused actors shared their holiday story. And we agreed, afterwards, that it was the best The Best Christmas Pageant Ever! ever.

Hugs. Congratulations. More hugs. Then goodbyes. And then Sally and I climbed up into Betty’s front seats and we headed North to where we are now. We ventured out this morning, drove to the nearest coffee spot, a Starbucks, where we stopped despite their corporate nonsense, and bought three large cups of slightly better coffee from a young women named Pebbles, which I am declaring The Best Christmas Employee Name Ever! From there we drove another six minutes to Phaeton Motorworks in West Durham, where we gave Betty over into the care of a nice but distracted young man whose back had just gone out and who was in terrible pain. Sally thumbed us a Lyft with Khalid in a sweet new Camry, who brought us back here. All of which constitutes, I feel moved to say, The Best Overly-Detailed Christmas Travel Update Ever!

As I parked Betty in front of the repair shop, I sort of pushed up against some bushes as I backed in. Before we left Montana, we’d purchased a cargo carrier that fit into our trailer hitch, onto which we’d strapped our two thrift-store antigravity lounge chairs. It was that cargo carrier, and those chairs, that I’d pushed into the bushes. We never once unstrapped those chairs since leaving home. All they got was The Best Christmas Highway Tour of America Ever!

Which brings me to the bait-and-switch. Sally and I started talking about his years ago. We’d notice, when we were at home for a few days, an ache, a call, and yearning. We’d get the idea that Wouldn’t it be fun to drive to town? Wouldn’t it be fun to go hit the thrift stores? Wouldn’t it be nice to go to a movie? Wouldn’t it be nice to eat at a certain restaurant? And every now and again it was “nice,” or nice enough. But all too often, it wasn’t really nice or fun at all. It was stressful. Dissatisfying. A let down. A meh. Once again, we’ve believed the story that told us that happiness, or fun, or fulfillment could be found “out there,” out in the shops and stores and strip malls, out in the culture, out in the world. Once again, we felt like we’d been fooled, haplessly playing Charlie Brown to the culture’s Lucy and her football. Once again, we failed to remember that which we’d thought we’d already learned many times before. It was deeply ingrained cultural programming, and it could sometimes fool even such inveterate culture-busters and Sally and myself.

And so of course the same thing came into play on this trip.

Sally fell down through the access hole to our crawl space. It was painful and scary, even though there was no lasting physical damage. She didn’t remember how it had come to happen. And we stopped to notice and accept how tired we had become, how long we’d been working on the house, how much remained to be finished, and how, while we had kicked that project’s butt, it had kicked ours as well. We began to talk of just surrendering. Just getting away for a long rest. Maybe going South, to the warmth. Maybe taking a long trip around the country, to visit friends and family, to spend long days just reading and sleeping and resting, and to see Blake’s play. Then came Betty. And more refined plans. And some fixing up and prepping and planning. Somewhere in there we managed to complete the legal work that earned us a septic permit so we could move into “the hoose,” as we had come to call it. Somewhere in there we moved, and fired up the wood stove, and tested out the heated kitchen floor, and figured out how cozy the hoose was, and determined that we could leave it for a spell. And because we had this play to attend, and because we had already bought Betty, we just kept going on that trajectory.

We dreamed of a week on a Florida beach. We imagined a slow and interesting journey along the Gulf Coast. We thought we might stop for a day or three in Myrtle Beach, to commune with some friends, old and new. We thought about heading north to New York, before all was said and done. And maybe even taking a side trip to San Diego on the way down. And we thought about the possibility of leading some group healing retreats in some of these places as we travelled. And of working on copy for our new website as we drove. And of doing some writing.

Our heads were full of Bait. Hopeful scenarios. Warm, beachy visions. Longings for rest and connection.

Much of which was quickly dispelled from our fantasy-prone idealist minds by the first two days of Interstate travel. The Switch. The football, pulled away. Aaarghhh!

We never once unstrapped those poor chairs. We were too cold. It was too hard. There were too many miles between here and there and back again. And we realized, again, that none of the towns, shops, restaurants, or beaches we might encounter would ever fill the ache we felt for both deep rest and intimate connection. In the end, as our plans and hopes and visions unraveled around us, I pointed out to Sally that what ended up guiding and determining the course and boundaries of our journey was people. Carol Anne and Jerry. Erin. Andy and Stacy and Blake and Cameron. Doug. Murray and Jean. To “turn toward kindness” meant turning to people who reached out to us with just that. And so they did. And so we did. And we found or created as much connection as we could, playing the game to pay out as much kindness as we received, even to night receptionists named Monica and baristas named Pebbles, and the rest of it - the road, the driving, the logistics, the dreams, the shops, the restaurants, the sand on the beach - the rest of it came to be recognized for the mirage it always was. It was all just Bait. It was all just Switch. We’d spent two weeks in The Best Bait-and-Switch Culture Ever!

And wouldn’t it be nice if this were the final performance of that particular show?

We await word from the Three Wise Mechanics. Inshallah we’ll hit he rowdy road early tomorrow morning. But it may be Woden’s Day. Or who knows? We’re not in control of such things. We just get to choose how we meet the world and her people in every moment.

That’s enough to keep us busy for the rest of our lives.

Pax and love to all.

Tim, and Sally, who sits now on the other queen bed, researching recipes for bean pasta and bean crackers.

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