Errand night. The roads were relatively clear, although with towering snow piles delineating every street corner it’s always risky to venture out into the neighborhood street, and I had many missions.
To get fuel. When I bought a diesel car, the saleswoman at Volkswagen assured me that diesel fueling stations were plentiful, but the only self-service gas station that is convenient to my commute just closed for renovations, leaving me reliant on a small local-owned repair shop with four full-service pumps. Its hours are erratic, although I like the people who work there, including an old man who sees me checking to make sure he uses diesel and invariably regales me with the only time he put gas in a diesel car. “We noticed! Don’t worry, we noticed, and we siphoned it out of there!” he says. Tonight he accidentally ran me up for $15 instead of $45 and asked me if he could run my credit card through again for $30. “I’m going to catch hell from the boss,” he said. “Because we pay a 5% fee for credit card transaction, so this will be double.” I didn’t catch his logic, if there was any, smiled and drove away.
To do laundry. Oh, why do we wear so many clothes! The laundromat was empty except for a clean-cut business man in a suit folding endless piles of baby clothes. He offered to help me lug my two bulging hampers of clothes into the laundromat, and I politely declined, though his kindness made me momentarily love the laundromat. We distant launderers, we’re all in this together.
To get cash. As my clothes were washing, I tip-toed to the ATM through the town center on sometimes icy pavement as rush hour wound down on the busy streets around me. I was rewarded with a fresh wad of cash that I pretended, for a moment, was serendipitously bestowed upon my wallet, and I guess in an abstract way, it was.
To go to the library. “I have some books on hold,” I told the librarian, and she told me I had three book waiting but only came back with two. “I was so startled by the contrast between these two books that I forgot about the third,” she told me, indicating Life by Keith Richards and Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand with a kindly chuckle. She ventured back into the stack of reserved books and brought back an Amharic phrasebook, her amusement complete.
To get fruit. I signed up at work to bring in a fruit salad for a company breakfast, so I ventured into Johnny Foodmaster and bought pineapple, cantaloupe, blueberries, grapes, bananas, apples, oranges, and kiwi. Hey, it’s winter, but it’s obviously in season somewhere. I hurried back to my car at the laundromat, eager to read the Keith Richards book while my clothes dried. The night had just begun.
