I’m in the breakfast room at the Holiday Inn. I’m slightly disgruntled because frittata days used to be my favorite, but last week, they started adding ham to the frittatas. Today, my breakfast consists of a cinnamon roll, a yogurt, and a sad plastic cup of orange juice.
The morning sunlight pours through the window to my left, flowing across my table and forming a bar of light that constitutes the no-sit zone for other hungry misplaced individuals. I always like to sit in the sun, though.
Across from me sits a duo whose backstory I’m slowly constructing in my head from snippets of conversation. At first I thought maybe hikers – it is that season, after all, and their conversation had an air of planning the day’s adventures. I had caught a mention of Tehachapi fairly early on in my breakfast, and most folks only know that name as a destination if they’re hikers or they’re really into trains. I didn’t peg these two as train buffs.
To my right, seated just a little further south so as to avoid sharing my ray of sun, what I’ve decided was a father and his middle-aged son were intently evaluating the progress of either:
An individual engaged in driving a decrepit vehicle to this location from somewhere distant in decrepit vehicle terms, or
An individual engaged in making an illicit delivery of some type
“He’s gotta stay on the surface streets, so it’s going to be another 3, 4 hours until he gets this far.”
Surface streets is a vernacular that you don’t really hear in the midwest. I’ve always enjoyed it, though – I first heard it in Matthew McConaughey’s Lincoln Lawyer and considered it to be a fun turn of phrase. I didn’t quite grasp the practical implications of it until I had spent some time in Los Angeles. 3-4 hours on surface streets… must be somewhere in the basin.
The steady diet of arguably non-polarizing news that typically serenades my breakfast when I’m here has been replaced with a black-and-white film and I must say, it’s an improvement.
My first coffee was a Grande White Chocolate Mocha from the Starbucks in Beaumont Hospital in what I believe was Dearborn, Michigan. It was a few weeks before my grandmother passed away. To the best my memory allows, I was probably about 12 or 13 years old.
What I remember the most is the sense of community that seemed to be intrinsic in those around me. Most of the people in the hospital lobby and cafeteria weren’t patients – they were visitors, friends, family. I got the sense that we were all taking a collective breath, stealing away for a few moments of comfort, before sucking it up and addressing some of the more unpleasant parts of life. Certainly my family seemed to be doing the same. We met with some extended family, exchanging pleasantries and talking for a few minutes about the weather or whatever, before the de-facto leader of our weary group took a deep breath and said “well, shall we?”
This cinnamon roll isn’t that good. It’s kind of dry and I think it’s been sitting under the warmer for a little too long. But my brain has built some kind of bridge to this cinnamon roll. Not to cinnamon rolls in general; my mother used to make cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning and they were wonderful, but that’s different. No, my brain is deeply connected to this cinnamon roll with the same neurons that still order a Grande White Chocolate Mocha after 20 years.
Everyone in this breakfast room is here in life’s vestibule with me. Some of us are going to work, some of us are going on an adventure, some of us are awaiting a mysterious arrival. Right now, though, we’re here for a moment – and that moment connects us. And in this moment, I’m happy.
Ugh, “life’s vestibule”… getting back into writing is rough, guys.