13 hours

I feel a little like Dorothy in Oz. Tuesday, I was in the middle of the usual controlled chaos of another work day when there was a sudden and dramatic shift in priorities. By 9pm Tuesday the car had been to the shop, some urgent banking had been done. Cat-sitters had been arranged. Hotel reservations made, we crossed the state line into West Virginia on Highway 70. My Beloved's mother lays dying in Jonesboro. It was a fluke we found out about it at all as various family members had conspired to hide this fact from My Beloved. This is a family that seems to use day-time soap operas as their moral compass. We saw the dawn in Cairo where barges and their tugs emerged sleepy-headed from the foggy confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi as if from their bedcovers. Cairo is well on it's way to becoming an archeological site. Never have I seen a town so vacant and decayed. We crossed into Missouri and left the interstate at Hayti. From there to the Arkansas line the cotton harvest was complete and the rectangular bales sat like small trailers the color of new cement parked at the end of the fields. Tufts of cotton lined the shoulder of the road. For some reason across the St. Francis river in Arkansas the cotton is still in the fields. Early Wednesday morning we checked into the Holiday Inn which had granted special permission for Dogzilla to stay as a guest as long as he was more dog than zilla. He loves the Holiday Inn for the sole reason that it is not moving. I love the Holiday Inn because Dogzilla will finally stay off my lap. It's not so much that he minds car trips but he will not have anything to do with My Beloved's lap, the back seat, or any number of doggy-bed options. He is attached to me as if with suction cups increasing the pull of gravity over my lap in the way only an anxious animal or child can do. So here is Jonesboro a featureless but thriving town. Thriving like mold in a closed refrigerator with the power off. We are waiting for the five minutes My Beloved has been granted to say goodbye to his mother. In a little while we'll have lunch with his grandmother, her mother, who is ignorant of her daughter's immanent demise by order of the family cabal.