A Shaggy Dog Story

After my mild vow to “like the world the way it is,” the gods decided to test me and I’m pretty sure I failed. It was one of those travel days where nothing goes as smoothly as this privileged person has come to expect that they should. Left my house at 7:30 am on my way to Memphis and Mississippi, wearing my traveling music teacher hat that still fits so well. I got to the airport with time to spare and when I got in line to board the first plane to Salt Lake City, I was in Zone 8. By the time it got to me, the announcement came that the overhead bins were full and remaining passengers had to check their luggage. Not horrible, but it does add another 30 minutes or more to the travel. But I was a bit disgruntled when I got on the plane and there was plenty of room in the overhead bins. Oh well.

 

In Salt Lake City, boarded the next plane, got settled in my seat and there came the captain’s announcement we never wish to hear. 

 

“Folks, we’re having a little technical problem here and the mechanics are looking at it, but if they can’t fix it, it looks like we’ll have to de-plane and change to another plane. “ Five minutes later. “Sorry to report that we have to de-plane. The new flight should be ready to go in an hour-and-a half or so.”

 

Not the end of the world. No pressure to get to Memphis at a specific time, as the next step upon landing was to rent a car and drive two hours or so to Jackson, Tennessee. So much tension in traveling has to do with schedules that matter— someone picking you up at the airport or work soon after you arrive or a crucial connecting flight. So I could afford to be relaxed about it. 

 

Finally arrived around 7:00 pm Memphis time, got my bag at baggage claim and walked a long, long walk to the rental car area. There was Avis, Hertz, Dollar, Enterprise, Alamo, etc. without a single person standing in line. But I had booked with Thrifty and was told they were one floor up. And there they were—with 12 people standing in line and one person to help them! Some 40 minutes later, I finally got to the window. Did all the paperwork, but my small to mid-size car was not right there on the lot, so someone went to get it. 30 minutes later, it finally arrived. 

 

So now at 8:30 pm, I was ready to do. Well, almost. I needed GPS and to do that, I needed to connect my phone to the car. The guy at the check-out kiosk tried to help me, but nothing was working. Cars were in-line behind me, so I drove over the point of no-return (the place where your tires get slashed if you go the wrong way) and started heading toward the exit. There was a woman at the next kiosk and I pulled over to see if she could get me connected. Bless her heart, she leaned in, scrolled through the options and voila! there was the map on the big screen! Started driving with the Siri voice talking to me and then out on the freeway, Siri went silent. I looked for an exit to pull over to figure it out and when I re-started the car, couldn’t get the map to appear on that screen. This was not good. 

 

Finally got to a place where I could see it on my small phone and when I saw “Proceed for 73 miles until exit 85” decided to shut off the phone for the next hour. Because on top of everything else, my battery was getting low and I didn’t see anywhere in the car I could charge it. Somewhere around 9:30, I stopped at a gas station having not eaten since noon and got a dinner of a banana and a small bag of potato chips. Turned my phone on at exit 85, made the wrong turn that put me off-route (of course) and was re-directed down scary back roads in the countryside to finally arrive at La Quinta Hotel around 10:45. Checked in a bit tired and hungry and slightly annoyed by all these little snafus, but not wholly beaten down by them. After all, I arrived alive and still in time to do my guest teaching at a school the next day. 

 

Read a bit, got to sleep around midnight and in the middle of the night, my door opened with someone rolling their suitcase into my room. “Hello?!!” I shouted, and they said, “Oh, sorry!” and ran out. It was 2:20 in the morning. Why were they given a key that worked for my room? Are you having fun, ye gods who were testing me?

 

I let myself sleep as late as possible, 9:30 am new time (7:30 San Francisco) and went down to breakfast. All tables were empty and I asked the women there about it. She said, “Oh breakfast closes at 9:00. But come, let’s see what’s left." And there was a little cereal and toast and hard-boiled egg. She offered me some milk and asked, “2% or whole?” So up I went with my food back to my room and of course, the key didn’t work. Down the hall were some people cleaning and I asked one to let me in and she did graciously, after listening to my little complaints about the middle of night awakening, missing breakfast and such. Once I was in, she said, “Well, hope you have a nice day. Or at least a better one!”

Now this is precisely the kind of story my wife and daughters will never listen to. I wondered if it’s what people call a shaggy-dog story and looked up what precisely that means. Wikipedia defines it thus:

 

“In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.  In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending. “

 

According to this definition, the above story fails to meet those qualifications in three ways: 

 

1)   The incidents are not irrelevant, but intimately connected—all little things that shouldn’t have gone wrong in the way I expect the world to behave but did.

2)   It’s not necessarily meant to be amusing, though if artfully told, the listener can be smiling with some schadenfreudan pleasure. 

3)   It actually does have a meaningful punch line. Which is this:

 

Every single one of the people who helped me with such kindness, empathy, grace and problem-solving ability— the one who rented the car, the one who figured out the car phone connection, the one who checked me into the hotel, the one who got me breakfast, the one who let me into my locked room— was a black woman. Every. Single. One. The kind of person who has suffered so much as a black person in a white supremacist culture, as a woman in a misogynist culture, as a working class person in a corporate capitalist culture. Who would have every reason in the world to ignore me, disdain me, delight in my little problems, insult me— and instead, responded as they did. I might also add that the man in the Food Mart who sold me the banana and chips was a Middle Eastern man who greeted me with,”Hello, brother.” These are the people who have always been marginalized in this “land of the free” and the current regime is doubling down on with its foot on their neck. And now that they are also including white people who protest in the “not-in-the-good-old-boys-club” and beginning to jail, deport, murder them as well, more and more people are awakening to what’s going down and rising up. 

 

Hope you are one of them this Saturday, joining 8 to 12 million or more who have had enough. Without this punchline, my little travel story would have been just another white-privileged-guy complaining that he had to suffer inconvenience. Instead, I’m so immensely inspired by and grateful to each of these women who so graciously helped me. This shaggy dog (well, bald) determined to bark fiercely to protect our humanity. Grrrrrr!!!!