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A Vacationing Girl on the Road in Nashville
Friday, June 1, 1994 [John Butler writes] My first summer of teaching high school English teachers in Nashville, in 1966 (when I was thirty nine), I had a lot of time on my hands on weekends. I was renting a very nice, large house in the suburbs, but didn't know any neighbors; no one stopped in on me and said "Welcome to the neighborhood." They know I was a visiting professor, so any time invested in getting to know such a person would be wasted. Or so I suppose they thought. Weekends there was only sporadic social life. If I gave a party on Friday night, my Institute had a party. If I didn't, there was no party. (I preferred Friday night to Saturday for parties because they made the weekend breaks seem longer, and I always felt I needed a lengthy break. The teaching-week was very intense.) Of course, I didn't want to give a party every weekend. I did organize some daytime weekend beach parties, and once a group of us went to a nightclub to hear a famous band (Boots Randolph), and another time to the Grand Ole Opry, and there were a few other social occasions and trips and volleyball games. But weekends I had to struggle to keep from boredom, and of course I was lonely. Usually on a weekend the most fun I had, if there were no party or gathering at the lake, was in reading my students' papers, and planning Monday's class, and making up the next few assignments if I hadn't already done so. And I should say that reading papers by a lot of bright, educated adults, and writing hard questions on them, was tremendous fun. Still, as I say, the problem lurking everywhere once my preparations were halted or ended was boredom. Starting out in the car to do errands late one Saturday morning I arrived at a big intersection, at the edge of the commercial area where I did my shopping, just in time to be stopped by a light turning yellow before a station wagon in front of me got to it. My road was two lanes, and the one I was about to turn onto was five lanes, so I knew it would be a long wait before the light turned green. I was in a convertible with the top down in bright Tennessee sunshine. I looked at the station wagon. The rear window was rolled down. Leaning on the broad horizontal door on her elbows, cupping her cheeks in her hands, was a girl of six or seven with one of the most bored looks on her face I had ever seen: utter, complete, helpless boredom. The license plate said Florida, so I quickly surmised she'd gotten up early at a motel many miles away, and now found herself three or four or five boring hours later on the road with nine or ten or more empty hours ahead of her. Her day's story was boredom behind her, boredom in the present, and boredom ahead of her. In the Middle Ages that was what was called, for a child that age (when a boring hour seems as long as a day), Despair. After having fought off boredom during some part of every previous weekend, I was in a perfect position to sympathize with this attractive little girl. I immediately saw a way to cheer her up and have some fun. When her eyes drifted over to my face, I quickly ducked down in my seat, then came up leaning way over to my right, and making my right hand into a pistol, instantly shot at her, going "POW!" with my mouth, quickly ducking down out of sight, but not before noticing that her face had lit up, not with amusement but just with interest. And without turning her head even a quarter of an inch, with one arm she reached behind her and to the side and tapped her little brother on his shoulder. I remember thinking "What a wonderfully thoughtful thing to do!" That gesture captured my heart. When I came up out of hiding, this time to the left of my body, I rapidly moved my left hand outside the car to the left of the windshield, took another shot at her, "POW!" followed instantly by a shot at her brother, leaning out the window beside her, "POW!" and ducked back down. I stayed down for a second, then came up in the same place; all three of us fired at once, then all three of us disappeared. For the next minute of so, no one smiled or laughed. We made it a real gun battle, bobbing up and down and firing at each other. The gunfight lasted till the light turned green and the station wagon slowly started pulling away. It turned left in a very large arc, the same way I was going to go, But I decided to let it get away from me; I toyed with the idea of pulling alongside for a battle at close range, but thought it might be anticlimactic or dangerous or both, so I dropped that idea. As the distance between us increased, we took our final shots at each other, and I ended the game by waving. Most children would have merely waved back, as the boy did; it would take an especially imaginative child to do more than that. This little girl apparently was an especially imaginative child; she said goodbye by waving and exuberantly blowing me a kiss, which ended in a huge, beaming smile, a look of total joy that I took to mean "Thank you more than I can say!" Wow! What a terrific thing to do! Who could ask for a happier ending to a couple of minutes of high- spirited tom-foolery than that? Perfect! The story of this experience was, of course, too good not to share. When I started Monday's ninety-minute class by describing it in detail at 8:30, using my lectern as the hood of my car as I acted out the way I disappeared by dropping down out of sight, and firing at my forty students as I came up on both sides of it, everyone was totally delighted. There were waves of hilarious laughter. All of the people in my audience had left their families and friends behind for the whole summer -- only one Participant had brought a spouse -- and their weekends (I assume) were as lonely and as full of bored stretches as mine, so they were more than ready to devour hungrily a story like this about an unutterably bored little girl, who turns out to be most lovable, and an imaginatively comical friendly adult. And, with all of us dying day after day for affection when I got to the end of the story with the little girl blowing me a kiss, which I acted out and then immediately said the words "She blew me a kiss!" while trying to imitate the huge smile, I think all of our hearts went out to her as everyone roared together in a moment of _totally_ surprised sudden laughter.
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