Who Wants to Boogie with Baby '37?

Midwestern people are the nicest anywhere. They’re like Indians, but fewer of them want your money or steal your stuff. Seriously, though. The guy at the front desk of this motel greeted me friendily. Then he pushed his black lab’s snout back through the sliding glass door behind the counter as the dog mumble/growled something, prompting the owner to inform me, “He thinks he can talk.” Later, when I re-entered the lobby to ask about a nearby store, the clerk called me by my name, having remembered it from my credit card, and politely told me that the convenience store next door was open for another fifteen minutes.

In other news, the Iowan freeway has more stars than I’ve ever before seen. I checked again at the motel, and the stars weren’t as many or as bright, but on the highway, when I gazed out the window, I saw more and brighter stars than I’d ever seen.

It’s actually kind of lonely spending New Year’s in a motel room with the only entertainment being the epic comic duo that was Kathy Griffin’s playing the thirteen-year-old bully trying to scandalize the polite, endlessly patient grandmother who looked suspiciously like Anderson Cooper. As I sat there alone, I wondered if I was having one of those climax-of-movie moments where people realize that everything they’ve felt was important in life had been a terrible selfish miscalculation. But then I thought, sure, I’m lonely, but that’s why Kathy Griffin and Anderson Cooper are here. I also wondered why it was that Anderson Cooper covered terrible large-scale tragedies and New Year’s Eve.

Driving along the Illinois highway, I gazed to my left and saw the most amazing sight—the bright sun behind wide-angle clouds being puffed out of a short-squat smokestack beyond a field of green ‘neath an otherwise blue sky. That may not sound like much (though I think we can safely say it was rather impressively rendered), but imagine this—imagine if there were a jar of marshmallow fluff—but not just any jar of marshmallow fluff. This jar of marshmallow fluff has lived a life so admirable, so worthwhile, so selfless, that it without a doubt merited beatification. And imagine if this marshmallow fluff were minding its own business one day, coming home from work on the A train, and all of a sudden, it steps onto the platform, and some desperate, drug-crazed kid with a gun sticks a snubnose in its side and whispers, loud enough to communicate his unyielding assuredness and soleness of purpose, but not loud enough for any of the other commuters to hear (it’s a loud station, after all), “Gimme all your cash, buddy,” and Marshmallow Fluff, not having any pockets, as his only attire is a jar, and therefore opting to carry only a single credit card (and his subway pass, of course) saying, “I’m sorry. All I have is this credit card. And this subway pass, of course. They’re both yours. Here,” hands them over. But the drug-crazed kid isn’t logical. He can see that marshmallow fluff has nowhere to stash his cash—has no cash cache, as it were, but he doesn’t realize it. He doesn’t make the connection. All he knows is he took a risk, thought he’d get some dough out of it, and it pretty much failed. He’s mad. He’s scared. He’s downright crazy. He pulls the trigger, putting a bullet through the jar and square into Marshmallow Fluff’s side at point-blank range.

This is no flesh wound. There’s no obvious reason for hope here. This isn’t even anything from which hope could be excavated—Fluff’s not gonna make it. And, soon, all-too-soon, as the kid backs up, apoplectic over what he’s done, scarcely believing his confused anger of a second ago could have made him do such a thing—turned him into a killer—and is jumped upon and taken down by a dozen or so commuters who had been standing behind him, all he—all anyone—can do is watch as the soul, the saintly, the unblemished, the white-as-his-mortal-guise soul leaves Fluff’s earthly jar and ascends upward, through the exhaust grate, up, away from the street, and alone, solitary, through a bright, sky-blue sky, his work in this life complete, his work in the next just begun—only that could begin to approximate this sight I espied along the Illinois highway.