Dine and Depart

Dinner with a friend is a nice way to end a home town visit. They meet at a new restaurant that is decorated with the cities’ past displayed upon the walls. It’s almost eerie how familiar the photos are as she recollects walking in those streets, during those times or riding the trolley. She remembers shopping in those stores.  Her first job was as a shoe saleswoman with the mother of the man who would become her Dean of Students when she went to college. Small towns can spawn relationships like that.  Her winter coats were won by her father playing a lottery game at a local clothing store with the prize being a sum of money for items in the store.  He won at least once a year, sometimes more than once, hence the winter coat was secured and her mother, a milliner, would top of the outfit with a gorgeous custom-made hat. She looks at “Central Park” and remembers “Dollar Days” which celebrates the city’s history and with sales also being displayed on tables in front of the stores.  In her mind, she sees herself singing in the park talent show in her Roaring Twenties satin lavender Flapper dress with all the white fringe. She doesn't win the contest but she has a grand time reflecting on the singing and dancing of her youth. 

She and her friend chat.  Their medical paradigms are almost polar opposites, homeopathy and allopathic, though Gracie is respectful, she approaches the case from perspective and is a firm proponent of the former.*

They talk on and the news comes into the conversation including people squatting in California. Yes, people renting someone’s house with a contract and then not leaving as they agreed to in a signed contract. This makes Gracie’s stomach flip. Really?!?!?!  How could this happen?  How could this person bring up such a subject after Gracie just confessed that she is scared to go on this trip? Gracie is gifted and cursed with an imagination that goes around the universe and back again in seconds and sometimes these trips take her to unpleasant destinations She manages to rein herself in, though, and soon the subject changes and dinner ends on a happier note.   Gracie resolves to her tell girlfriend just to kick her out of the house if she begins to dither.

Gracie remembers the trip counselor's guidance:  “You don’t really begin a road trip until you go someplace you have never been.  Gracie knows she is going to two such places in Ohio. First to Kirtland. She couldn’t find it on the map as she was spelling it Kirkland, a reminder of when decades before as she couldn’t find Florence, Italy on the map.  It’s Firenze if you please.  Spell it right or you will never find it. After Kirtland, she will rock and roll into Cleveland, Ohio.  

* NOTE: Come a pandemic or epidemic Gracie will bet her life on homeopathy.  Among other reasons, Homeopathy proved to be the great healer during the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic.  For example, "Dr. T.A. McCann, from Dayton, Ohio, at the 77th Annual Convention of the American Institute of Homeopathy in Washington, D.C., in 1921, reported that 24,000 cases of flu were treated allopathically which had a mortality rate of 28.2%, while 26,000 cases of flu treated homeopathically had a mortality rate of only 1.05%." These statements are from "The Faces of Homeopathy: An Illustrated History of the First 200 Years, Julian Winston, 1999; and referenced in "The Homeopathic Treatment of Influenza, Sandra J. Perko, Ph.D., C.C.N.

Copyright © 2014 Martina Sabo