Is Eating Necessary?
Elizabeth Graham Monk
The night is starless, the trees, leafless, and I don't feel so chipper either. It's me, Gun-Marie Collier Carpenter, and I, a new-found hermit, ambitious to be a pariah, am off to a horrible party. I suspect I've been invited out of pity. My husband has left me for another woman, a younger woman and presumably tonight my hosts intend to feed me in order to express sympathy. I am late. I drive slowly and pray for an adequate miracle.
I am in an unfamiliar district, piously near, but at a safe distance from the black community. I pass a neon-glut of fast food franchises and pray on. And lo a detour. Surely I will get lost. Hallelujah. Another detour. Are they digging up the world? I am convinced of salvation when suddenly I am at my destination. The house is old and ramshackle and not picturesque. It has a fresh coat of khaki paint. A redwood deck has been attached.
Earl answers the chimes in a shirt of last year's color, and shoes that are this year's neutral. I bubble apologies that blame the detour, and Earl gushes a diatribe on the throw-away culture, idiots in the Highway Department, idiots on the City Council, government bureaucrat idiots in general, his taxes, and the need for a well-staffed, well-financed citizen ombudsman office.
