CRACKER BARREL

I meet Dustin at 7:30 in the morning in the dirty (in between) at Port Authority.

We sit and smile on the bus to the airport.
We have fragmented hopeful tidbits of conversation like two kids excited to go back to camp.

We pick up a rental car at Newark and drive ten hours to Athens Ohio by way of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and finally Ohio.

The drive there is fun and tiresome. But the landscape on the way there is decorated with trees in various stages of bloom. There are tons of different shades of colors for he emerging Spring buds. We talk about a recurring purple tree that we never did find out, the name of.

Whenever I drive out of the city I am reminded that the land outside of the city is quiet and more open and easy and also somewhat boring.

New York is the emerald city.

Dustin and I have dinner at a Cracker Barrel. Cracker Barrel is an amusement park style restaurant. The wait staff is cast as county folk and it has a large gift shop selling the myth that Maryland is really just like "Hee Haw".

Our 82 year old hostess Zoey is tiny and humped over with large teased up blue hair and war paint on her sunken face.
Zoey has clearly suffered a stroke.

I ask if she'll be our waitress, and she replies with worldly self knowledge, humility and kindness,

"Oh no, Oh, I'm too awkward to be your waitress."

(She understands these out of towners might be laughing at her, egging her on for a good show and Zoey is game.