Now the first hand is scored. Have you gone out? Or were your pairs only ever pairs, and all the wrong suits floated your way, and the wild cards evaded you entirely? The scorer, your mother-in-law, calls the names of each of your in-laws, and they answer by saying the totals of the points against them. “Fifteen.” “Ten.” “Twenty-five.” A high score is usually said in a tone of embarrassment or masked by a huffy sarcastic laugh. Except your father-in-law; if he gets stuck with fistfuls of junk, and people draw the discards he wanted to snatch for himself, he only ever says a high score in a forlorn but resolved tone. It is only fate, as he sees it—the same random force we are so tragically helpless to in matters of health and illness.
You are off to a beneficent start. You drew a wild on your final draw and you got “Smooth.” This earns you an impressed hum from your mother-in-law as she draws a line through the box under your name. The others peer at the cards laying down before you on the table: triplets of cards you laid in careful arrays, feathered to not hide the suits, the numbers and letters. For a moment it seems you must know what you are doing—maybe you should run for office.
You take a satisfying swig of milk and watch the film coat the mug’s slightly aqua-tineted Coke-bottle glass.
And in this moment, there is a growing sense of the peculiar changes in mood, thought, and perspective that are made possible by travel. The whimsy of it all surfaces, coalescing in a mundane but calming reflection: that by moving physically across a space, you have literally “left your troubles behind.” Fate, chance. The same things. You are content in some unlocated space, for the time, not obligated to the ordinary things.
The motif itself—Omnibus—expands, and you enjoy an appreciation for the vechile, its cozy interior space, and its hefty, liquid movement across the psychological landscape, across this history narrative-ized.
In any journey, you reflect, places pass you by, and some catch your interest, and some don't. Some seem truly like important landmarks and enchant you; others are ugly, ill-conceived sites that should perhaps be razed. That's all good. A glad tide of equanimity accompanies you to the dorm-sized refrigerator. With a glad heart, you refill your milk glass, and those of your family members.
Back at your seat, you check the bound map provided in the elastic netting of the seatback. There it is, the next destination. You take out your blue Pilot Precise V7 rollerball pen, check the ink level in the ink viewing window, and on the map circle the words which you just saw pass you by on road sign: