WhimsyLand

Derek and I drove 900 miles the first day, stopping only for breakfast which indeed included a large plateful of fried eggs and ham.  By 8 PM, we were still 200 miles from Chicago and decided that enough was enough for one long day.  Thus ensued the hunt for a motel, which (as usual) involved stopping at a MacDonald's long enough to fire up my laptop, paying $2.50 for WiFi, and combing through motel offerings in that part of the country where Iowa borders Illinois.  It's not clear there are any actual cities there, as all of the Travelocity entries were sited in the Quad-Cities Area, none of which I knew the names for (and still didn't after sleeping a night in one of their Holiday Inns).  The next morning, we headed out early and made it to The Loop early enough to have breakfast at The Orange and still make Derek's noon class.  I spent the duration of his classroom time driving around Chicago trying to reorient myself, eventually landing at a new Whole Foods store on Roosevelt that wasn't there the last time I hit the City of Wind.  And it was a killerbee example of WF with a salad bar affair for shrimp, roasted vegetables, gelato and a half-dozen other scrumptious offerings.  In the end, I just bought a $3 toothbrush and a $4 tube of Tom's (of Vermont) toothpaste, which was the least expensive oral hygiene products available.  I picked up Der and headed back to WF to help Der and Max stock up on such staples as granola, trail mix, and gourmet tomato sauce, meanwhile acquiring the fixings for the dinner I wanted to fix them.  The latter consisted of a huge chicken that almost certainly ran free all her life dining on the best nature has to offer and died at a ripe age happy to add her moist flesh to our repast.  The chicken was baked in a medium oven surrounded by carrots, shallots, celery, onion slices and red peppers, which were not only delicious, but a wonderful collection to send the bird off to her next phase in the cycle of the reborn.  I won't dwell on the cleanup phase of the night's festivities, wherein I mopped up enough accumulated goo to actually find the oven and stovetop, as I remember my own college days still too vividly.  Der and I had one more great meal at Eleven, a diner near Columbia that seems to specialize in lox & bagels, brisket and matzo but admits to being far from kosher, seeing as their dinner special was a double pork chop.  For the record, Der had the "Tom Waits 2 AM Special", which consisted of this huge pile of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, hash browns, pancakes, marble rye toast, and I can't remember what else.  After a few hugs, I was off to Eau Claire, getting on I-94 a few short blocks away, as I-94 is exactly the interstate that runs by Junie's home.  Little did I know, and of course being a guy I didn't actually look at a map, that I-94 takes off in three or four directions, one of which is Milwaukee, whose skyline I was enjoying when it occurred to me that I was probably a little east of where I wanted to be.  Fast forward through a new route via Madison, arriving at Junie's, two days of tiling the bathroom while trying to recreate that scene from Ghost with Junie and tiling grout, the official handoff of the Subaru to the Junie Clan, and a pleasant NWA flight with my sweet one back to Colorado. 

Sweet Junie presented me with a treasure trove (as they say on What Do You Know) of poetry books, including Dean Young's Primitive Mentor, TT's Complex Sleep, and Gabe Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook.  I haven't had a lot of time with any of them, but have read enough to know that I will like them all (I'm actually halfway through Primitive Mentor, as I can read it in random order).  I am only 10 pages into Gabe's work and love it already, even though I tend to like my poetry to be poetry and my fiction to be fiction.  Here's an excerpt from the first page:

The Ford Expedition is an abomination.  Great day teaching at ISU today except for the one kid hunched at his desk:  the sand-dollars of his sleep hanging under his eyes kept clacking in the small breezes of his mouth weather.  I woke him and explained that eye-sleep constitutes a type of guano.

I also have a couple of poetry journals to read, including the Poetry that arrived today with 3 (!) of Seth's poems in it and a dueling-banjo review of Alice Oswald.  More tomorrow.  I'm not traveling, work has slowed down, Junie has (sniff, sniff) gone back to Wisconsin, and I have no reason not to be your trusted correspondent again.