While at the standard free Comfort Inn breakfast in Charleston WV, I again complimented the manager on his pleasant and immaculate establishment—the opposite of its forbidding exterior appearance.  Overhearing me, another guest chimed in, similarly impressed.  The manager then elaborated on the motel’s complete renovation, and how every day through COVID he and his family had wondered if they should just give up and close.  It’s been a tough two years.  I wished these hard-working folks well and drove off to guide myself through the West Virginia State Capitol before continuing on my way to Kentucky.

Cass Gilbert’s creation is august and grand, and on this morning echoing with exuberant school kids taking tours—a fine thing.

I picked up a handsome “commemorative history” of the building, in its seventh printing as of 2022 and free, though a stack of these in the House chamber went ignored by other visitors talking about every- and anything other than the building or the government it celebrated.  A metaphor for our poor country’s current disarray?  After seeing all I could see, I exited through the Kanawha River entrance—a one-way exit—and startled a staffer smoking a cigar on the magnificent portico. 

He cautioned me I couldn’t re-enter that way, but when I assured him I was finished with my tour, he began telling tales of the building, including how “Building 3,” the green-roofed edifice behind the Capitol, was also a Cass Gilbert building.  Though the state historians owned the blueprints for the Capitol building, they lacked the blueprints for Building 3—but discovered them, oddly enough, up for sale by a Gilbert relative on eBay.  “You can’t imagine,” he said between draws on his cigar, “what it took to secure a p-card with an unlimited cap so they could bid for those blueprints on eBay!”  Another metaphor exposing the absurdity of metamodern life?

I walked around to the garden façade of the building and at a teacher’s request snapped a photo of her and her class assembled there.  The kids were cute and polite, singing out a soprano chorus of “Cheese!” when I asked them to, and then continuing to pose for my own cell shot.

As they passed me on their skipping ways, they just as cheerfully each piped, “Have a nice day!”  Such courtesy to strangers, I thought.  More native to the south than NH.

Back on the road west, the classical FM frequency I was listening to was intercepted by a Christian radio host dissing President Biden for being “so typically left wing,” making his post-shooting visit to a grieving Buffalo “political” by referencing the “so-called replacement theory.”  A white 18-year-old, deranged by racial hatred and disinformation, targets a grocery in a black community and murders 10 people.  What should our politician-in-chief say?  Even as I thought that, I turned off I-64, having promised myself a bite to eat once I crossed over into Kentucky, and saw first, a McDonald’s, and second, parked across the street, a white truck, flying two U.S. flags and two Trump flags, behind a large sign the read “AMMO.”  OMG.  The trouble we’re in.

But hunger prevailed and I went into the McDonald’s looking for the salads I recalled they once used to offer.  No such luck.  But the helpful young woman behind the counter had a solution, posed with rising inflexion:  “ You can order a Crispy Chicken Deluxe and tell ‘em to hold the bun and give you extra lettuce and extra tomato?”  Suddenly, I’m a young Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces!  Since this youngster was, however, quite sincerely wanting to help me, I did NOT tell her to hold the bun “between her knees.”  I had my pseudo salad, surreptitiously took photos of the ammo truck and the road-side cross—and knocked over Stop sign beside it–and headed for Danville.

I arrived at my friends Bill and Grazia’s house while they were still at work, Bill continuing his art historical scholarship and Grazia at her clinical social work/therapist practice, and so had time to appreciate the beauty of their home set in a leafy green neighborhood in full spring display. 

Such a happy reunion with these two friends!  I’d last visited in February 2020, just before the pandemic shut us all down, when they’d invited me to return and stay in their “little house” when next I came to Danville.  Having spent 1984-1995 professing at Centre College in Danville, I still have many dear Kentucky friends in town, and so I took up their kind offer.  Such tasteful luxury!  Both the inviting “big” house and the little one are beautifully appointed with period pieces, art, and books all enhanced by the gracious hospitality of these two.  Over a lovely dinner of antipasto (Grazia is Florentine), salmon, and potatoes roasted with garlic, Bill unintentionally challenged my memory by asking about my dissertation (c. 1984:  that IS a long time ago; how flattering to be asked, though I can hardly remember my argument).   Grazia and I bonded over more recent texts:  turns out we had both read Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down about the cultural collision that ensued over the treatment of a Hmong child with severe epilepsy.  More immediately, we shared our common admiration of Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet, especially O’Farrell’s painfully accurate rendering of grief.  However fictional, the novel’s invention of a Hamlet backstory not only chimes with my decades’ acquaintance with Shakespeare, but also with Grazia’s practice as a therapist—and, sadly, experience as the mother of a vivacious, beautiful, clever daughter lost in 2007 to a senseless Boston gunfight.  Sitting in the lovely dining room at the end of a perfect meal with such dear friends reminds me of a much earlier conversation with another close friend, one also devastated by a shocking, violent loss.  Her answer to the question and answer raised by such trauma, a personal, non-sectarian catechism:  Why are we here?  To take care of each other.

I settle down to sleep in the lovely bedroom of “the little house,” comforted by the ties that bind old friends.