“It smells good here, but it’s a little bit weird.”
The odor was vaguely pine, or at least something pleasantly
evocative of the great outdoors- a hint of Pure Nature to mitigate the extreme
grunge of the parking lot in which we were sitting. It was a place where every few
minutes a panel truck would pull up scratchily with an intensity that made
the gravel pop really, really loudly.
A workman would jump out of the driver's seat, head purposefully inside the store, dash back
out minutes later and be gone. A piss stop no doubt.
After a long and much too eventful road trip, we were sampling the offerings of a supposed Dunkin’ Donuts, chilling at a ravaged picnic table in a
small parking lot on an empty road in the middle of Massachusetts
If you’ve perused this blog before you also probably know about my
newfound romance with Dunkin’ Donuts. So I imply sort of regarding the
authenticity of this self styled member of the famed coffee concession because
if it weren’t for the familiar orange logo we could have sworn it was just a crappy
convenience store in the middle of nowhere with a tiny counter at the back. The
decaf we sipped was tepid, watery and tasteless, the beloved Old Fashioneds rock
hard, but we were glad to be alive. More about that in a moment.
The store’s bathroom- a major reason for stopping- was
decidedly low tech, with no sensor on the hand drying contraption but just another
“old fashioned” kind of setup- a pull down, brown paper towel dispenser. Inexplicably
I found these brittle little pieces of paper comforting. Right outside on the wall beside the bathroom door a
bulletin board with the catchy title “Contractor’s Corner” displayed a mulch of
business cards pinned up at every crazy angle. This too calmed me- it seemed so
“solid.”
Yes, it all could have ended very differently we reminded
ourselves, as the barely eaten chunks of donuts slipped off the napkins onto the table, had we not just randomly happened
upon the tire place about an hour’s ride back.
Prior to finding ourselves in the small graveled parking lot
of this semi-rural convenience store, we had started out that bright August morning,
weary but not yet totally defeated, on an escape from the vampirish horrors of
real estate- an enterprise that had been crushing our souls for most of July.
Wading into the morass of selling was the ultimate fair
seeming evil, and right in character it appeared to become tantalizingly
fruitful quite early in the game; but there was a catch. The buyer who pounced
as soon as the listing went online wanted us out in more or less a minute or so.
I can’t get out of bed that fast, much less pack up a house on fast forward and
we still had no place to go. Three weeks into the process of trying to continue
to negotiate and keep showing we were pretty much disgusted with the whole
thing; it was taxing our attention spans and making us exceptionally testy. So
we folded up shop and left town.
In our growing desire to cleanse the minds of the silly putty called real estate, we had sprung for four new tires to help speed us along the interstate. The
prospect of a small, recuperative vacation to meet up with family lay serenely before us. The new tires gave a false sense of security, the rubber-hits-the-road
smugness that comes with rubbery smelling, spanking newness under your
chassis. The eternal possibility of inedible,
faux donuts and thin, make belief decaf lying in wait somewhere up the road notwithstanding,
it still seemed like the perfect time to head for the hills.
That is, until we found out about the unbelievably screwed up tire situation and the near, total, road disaster. . . .
That is, until we found out about the unbelievably screwed up tire situation and the near, total, road disaster. . . .
(Part Two Next Week)
