News from Nowhere

I have another reason for writing this post. Besides always wanting to title a blog in honor of William Morris's book of essays on the state of utopia, I spent the weekend in western Kansas, near a town called Phillipsburg. Sarah and I drove out to visit her relatives, her mother's parents, father's parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. This was 20+ hours on the road from where I live.

Lanette Cadle says, "Both Missouri and Kansas people are storytellers, but the stories from Kansas have a darker flavor." I will try to capture that flavor here.

The trip combined with my fallout after the university's semester ended -- I had mentally burned out by the time I turned in my student's grades -- left me reluctant to punch the keys. I'd thought I'd bust my chops (and re-learn the alphabet) by relating my Top 5 Moments from Nowhere:

• Eating lunch at a burger stand called The Chubby Pickle, which boasts the greasiest (sorry, McDonald's) hamburgers every grilled. The mascot is a vaguely racist-looking pickle-man wearing a bow-tie and gloves. You can buy a t-shirt with him on it. And the burgers (I'm not joking) are known as "The Big Chubby," "The Super Chubby," and so on. This is one of Phillipsburg's five or so restaurants.
  Another is the Pizza Hut.

• Sarah's Grandpa Carly and Grandma Diane: these two were wonderful company. Carly, who was once the sheriff and quite a musician, played us some tapes he had recorded with his western swing band. They showed us pictures of Sarah and of the family from way, way back when. I set up an old computer for Diane to write letters on. Both Diane and Carly love animals, so the farm and house are crawling with cats and dogs. Between them and their son, Jim, who lives next door, they have two dogs named "Sugar."

• Jim is on the terrorist-watch list. Sarah's uncle is a born storyteller, and we talked for hours about almost any subject anyone could think of. The best stories were about Jim, who used to travel six days a week, being placed on the terrorist-watch list. Which makes it difficult, you might imagine, to fly.

• Sarah's uncle Jim also found 5/6 of a set of 1890 Charles Dickens at a garage sale in some small nearby town. The name on the set is Daniel Brobst of Manhattan, Kansas. The first volume is missing and the books themselves are worn, but together the set is worth $300 (or so we discovered this weekend, when we looked it up on the computer). So reading the old books and papers in them was an interesting experience.

• I love western Kansas, and the best thing about traveling back was that I got to see where Sarah was born and raised until she was six years old. I can't fit all of the people into this post, and I can't fit in all the experiences (The Adventure of the Low-Flying Plane Over the Highway, The Adventure of the Wind Turbine Farms, and The Adventure of the Meth House are just three more experiences that would fill a story of their own; readers must content themselves for now with just the titles).

Now that I've written this list, which is silly and doesn't do justice to the experiences I had in Kansas, I safely believe I can move on and write something more.

Coming Up Next: A New Direction for the Blog? What does Ben have planned for the summer? Also, What Ever Happened to The Red Ink Journal? The answers are coming on the new season of Write Well.