Apology

A brief apology for misspelling some names in the last post. It has been rectified.

The Road Home

Quiz: You are in Iowa City, Iowa, a city in the Central Time Zone. Tomorrow you need to be at church in South Bend, Indiana, 301 miles away, at 12:30 local time—scratch that; you need to be there by 11 for lunch with an old friend. (Note: South Bend may or may not be in the Eastern Time Zone.) Assuming the speed limit is an average of 70 miles per hour the whole way and that it will take you 25 minutes to get up, dress, pack up your friend's station wagon, and say goodbye to the generous fellows who let you inhabit their living room free of charge for three days, for what time should you set your alarm? Oh yeah, and Daylight Savings Time ends tonight at 2 am. And you generally snooze once or twice.

Somehow Joey and I figured this one out before falling asleep Saturday night, and we got on the road a little after 5 local time in order to meet our friend K at her home on Notre Dame campus. Check that: we were going to see Joey's friend. As of yet she was only my blog-friend, which I'm not sure fully qualifies, or at least this guy I met at the conference didn't seem to think so. But now, I'm happy to say, K and I are full-fledged friends, after having spent an hour eating frozen pizza, talking about Asia, and kicking Koopa butt on Mario 3, perhaps the best game ever invented.

K, thanks for a lovely afternoon.

After leaving South Bend, we headed back to Athens by way of Toledo and Findlay (thank you Tom and Elisa for making these more than mere names to me) and Columbus. I drove and surfed the local radio stations in hope of hearing some Journey—no luck, but we did hear some good ones—Joey dozed. For the last hour or so of the trip Joey read aloud from his copy of Best American Travel Writing 2001, a great piece about Icelandic culture and the effect of the global ban on whaling on their national sensibilities. We rolled into my driveway at a little after 8, another road trip successfuly concluded.

Day 3

On day 3 we were treated to a panel featuring Pat Madden and the former OU crew, and another panel featuring both Dinty Moore and Pat Madden, among others.

In the first panel Pat and friends talk about quotidiana—the commonplace, everyday things from which many essays are and should be constructed. It was a breath of fresh air, a concrete and entertaining presentation that left me with something nearly tangible (I don't mean the cool bookmarks Pat made either) where other panels and forums left me with only tentative musings. Pat's powerpoint presentation was awesome as usual, a testament to Microsoft's ability to get some things right despite the end-users' general inability to comprehend and excel.¹ I also enjoyed hearing a beautiful elegy-for/rally-to-remember A. A. Milne's forgotten essay endeavors.

Dinty's panel consisted of six essayists writing imitations of Montaigne's "Of Thumbs." The way it worked was that Dinty had constructed a series of constraints each writer had to follow in constructing their homage essays, things like, "Write in the second person," and, "Use the same number of paragraphs and the same first letters of each as Montaigne did in writing your piece," and, "Write an essay on a topic that rhymes with 'thumbs' (drums, hums, chysanthemums)." Each writer had rolled two dice to see which constraints would guide their work and now presented their attempts to our applause and laughter. A good time was had by all.

I noticed today that the most-used word throughout the conference was probably "ostensible." This word means "stated or appearing to be true, but not necessarily so."

I also noticed that L was wielding a blue Papermate Write Bros. medium point pen, my favorite pen in the whole wide world.

I left early from a reading in the ballroom to sit in the hall softly dozing while pretending to read the Agatha Christie book I've toted around all week. Sometime while I was sleeping, L got up and left the reading too, ostensibly to return to her hotel and watch some TV. As this was the last day of the conference and she wouldn't be returning for dinner, it was the last we ever saw of L.

At dinner Joey and I were sitting with Brad, a student from Bowling Green we'd befriended. All of a sudden a nicelooking guy came up and asked if he could sit with us; we assented. His nametag read "Daniel Jones, New York Times." We asked him what he did, and would you believe it—he edits the "Modern Love" column featured every Sunday in the Style section of the paper. I love that column, and I told him so. He knew of Joey from his publication in 20something Essays. It was fun to chat and promise to send something to him for the column as soon as I manage to fall in love and thus have something to write about.


¹Pun intended. Word.

Day 2

Things that happened on day two:

• I chewed the end of my pen into a delicate, fluted curve.
  
• I smugly recalled why I love chalkboards so much more than whiteboards as markers once again proved their inferiority to chalk.¹
  
• I sat in very crowded rooms in which there weren't enough chairs. All the people sitting on the floor eventually wished they were standing against the back wall, while all the people standing in back wished they had a bit of floor for themselves.
  
• I heard Richard Rodriguez give a great keynote address over lunch.
  
• Walking into the large ballroom for that same lunch, I noticed a marked difference between the sound of the hundred or more people talking and, say, any high school lunchroom. A school cafeteria's roar is sharp, full of peaks and sudden flares, the sound of individuals furiously claiming their individuality. It is a battle of wills and decibels; it is oppresively loud. The sound of this room was still a roar, but it was a soft one, a muted congregation of voices taking turns, taking interest, taking time. It was no adolescent standoff of one-upmanship or perish but a calmer, cooler quiet-loudness, not the waterfall or the rapids but the deeper swell of the river on the plain. That, or it might have just been the carpet eating up the reverberations a tile floor might have aplified.
  
• I met a girl from BYU who had come apparently on a whim and an opportunity, a girl whom I'll codename "L." One of Pat's students, L hung out with Joey and I for most of the rest of the day. The three of us went to Subway for dinner where we had one of those vast conversations of great breadth and depth that make you remember how much you've missed having vast conversations. L was delightfully lucent and lucid in her opinions—especially once she became comfortable with us—and she showed in her eyes and smile that great confidence of a thinker.
  
• Also in Subway, I recognized and reminded myself to write down how much I love getting a fountain drink and, instead of filling it up all the way with ice and soda and then capping it with a plastic lid and straw, merely filing it up a third or so with something and then sipping it straight from the cup. Love it love it.
  
• Also in Subway I noticed an Iron Maiden song playing in the background and thought of Steve.
  
• Sitting in the car outside of a gas station while Joey called our hosts on the pay phone, I looked over and noticed the trip odemeter had reached 611 miles.

¹This reminds me of one of the great pranks: the "Magic, Unerasable Chalk" (otherwise known as a white crayon, carefully dusted and left in a chalk tray).

Day 1

Here's the rest of what happened yesterday:

Joey and I were sitting in the opening session of the conference talking to our professor Dinty W. Moore and recounting our overnight trip when Pat Madden, our old professor we'd had at BYU and from whom we'd carefully hidden our planned attendance at this conference, walked in and sat down several rows behind and on the far right side from us. As the opening speaker got rolling we kept looking back to see if he'd notice us. After a while we gave up and concentrated on not dozing too deeply during the speech (a losing battle—we seemed to trade off nodding off), but then, just at a certain lull in the oration, we both simultaneously looked around at Pat just at the moment when his eyes strayed out over the crowd. We watched his line of sight slowly converge with ours, and our faces cracked into big smiles when we saw that he saw us.

After the talk we finally got a chance to say hi and reveal that we had brought him some Wild Wing Sauce from Athens, a commodity he had sorely missed since moving away (to which he noted that there was a Wild Wings in town, so it wouldn't have mattered if we had not come nor brought the gift, but he apologized for that comment today; no offense intended, none taken). He invited us to go to lunch with him and some old friends of his, a jolly group of editors and professors and writers of all ages, so we all went walking around Iowa City to find a place to eat.

Now I could tell you about the fun conversations that we had, about awards and publishing and the secret inner politics of certain lit mags in this country, but I'd rather tell you about the hostess at the small bar/restaurant we decided on. She was tall and had shortish blondish hair—that's really where the description ends, mostly because I'm a poor hand at describing pretty girls and also because I am crummy at noticing the details. I'm not even sure she was blond. The important part is that I said thank you to her and smiled as she showed us to the hastily mashed-together tables by the window, and she smiled back. And she continued to smile at me whenever she came around with an extra menu or anything.

Was she smiling at me, or did she smile at everyone as part of the job (or her personality)? Does it change anything that she made eye contact with me? Did my quiet thank you have anything to do with it?

I don't know the answers to these questions, and I don't really care. I only record this because it is the kind of kindness that makes one's day and I told Joey that I intended to keep a record of all my psuedo-flirtations of whatever kind. This is one of them. It's an oddly gratifying experience to be smiled at, to be made eye contact with, to find evidence that at least one person in the world finds you somehow attractive. And these kindnesses need not go anywhere at all; it is enough that they exist.

The rest of the day was spent in a daze of dozing off in panel discussions and readings. Eventually I bailed out to a chair in the lobby and propped my feet up in front of three plasma screens (playing Fox News, MSNBC, and ESPN simultaneously: two with captions, one with sound) and went to sleep. Joey floated in and out of my semiconsciousness as he seemed to keep leaving to call his wife and arrive again only to tell me that he had to leave to call his wife. And then Dinty Moore showed up and told us that because of a malplanned website the conference bosses had ordered twice as much food as necessary for the optional classy dinner and he thought we should just sneak in and eat the trash-can-bound leftovers. We thought that was a great idea, but being of sensitive conscience, Joey thought it best to ask Robin Hemley in person if that was alright. So we did. And he assented readily (out of guilt for not admitting Joey to his program?). So we ate way too much and then some.

Then we left to find the home of a nice finance PhD student who had offered us his couches by way of globalfreeloaders.com. There we slept the sleep of the dead tired.

[This is the end of day 1. Please turn the tape over for day 2.]

Thanks to Garrett

You can watch this important news report.

This one right here.

The Road Trip

So last night, Halloween Night, Joey and I said goodbye to his wife and kids and to my roommates, and at 10:15 we set off on a road trip. Destination: Iowa City, Iowa, the NonfictioNow Conference.

Our first stop was to put air in the tires and get some cash. Our second stop was buy some pound-its from Burger King. While placing my order I fell into a quick rapport wth the sultry telex voice; we psuedo-flirted as I asked for a 5-piece nuggets and a couple rodeo burgers. I said, "Hey, that's it," to which she responded, "Second window, dear." Does this ever happen to anyone else?

When we pulled up to the second window we saw two possible owners of the voice—an 18ish-year-old girl dressed up as an electrical outlet and an 18ish-year-old girl dressed up as a Burger King drive-thru worker. She turned out to be the latter, and our just-because-were-a-customer-and-a-worker tone continuedas she handed out the goods. We even sweettalked her into giving us some Halloween candy (we chose Dots, of course).

From there it was pretty much a straight shot west across Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, me driving, Joey pretending to sleep. I listened to the first chapter of David Copperfield, Tusk by Fleetwood Mac, Love by the Beatles, Continuum by John Mayer, and one story from Carry On, Jeeves by P. G. Wodehouse. Joey took over at around 5 in the morning, somewhere outside of Peoria, and we chatted the rest of the way into town.

At some point in the night Joey was distracting me with words and I almost took an off-ramp too rapidly. Joey nearly ran down a coyote that couldn't decide whether it wanted to cross the street or not.

At 7 am (central time) we walked into the conference and became the first people to register. Then we sat around trying not to fall asleep and waiting to see our friends Dinty and Pat. All in all it has been a good trip so far, but you will of course excuse me if I do not finish listing the full events of the day at this time. It is nearly midnight, and I haven't slept for something like 40 hours (except for some dozing during the conference). More to follow; in the meantime I remain affectionately yours, and co., etc.,

S. David Grover