THE MINUTIA OF LIFE

The Minutia of Life

Train Station, Downtown Portland, Oregon, December 19, 10 pm.

"Listen, Ginny, we’re inside the women’s restroom in the Chicago Amtrak Station. If you get this message, cause you did not pick up your phone just now, if you get this message, well. Well, just know that you did hear from us here. We think we’re being followed, I mean, some man started being everywhere we went today, all around downtown, even in Nordstrom where we ended up buying winter coats because it is way too cold here in Chicago and parts east. Then a little while ago, after we’d bought something to eat, Maddie saw him at the ticket window, chatting up the clerk, before buying a ticket. He’s been hanging around the waiting area near us. When the loudspeaker announced the train to parts east, ending in New York City, was delayed for ninety minutes, the guy disappeared into the men’s room. That’s when we hightailed it into the womens. We’re down at the end in the handicap stall, the only one big enough for both of us to hide, along with our luggage. We’re waiting for our train to be announced, and we’ll call you again to let you know we made the train without any trouble from this jerk. Okay. Well, I’m going to hang up now."

So that’s where we’re hanging out, Maddie, my cousin who is already eighteen and me. I’m Sadie, only seventeen but the taller of the two of us, and I think perhaps the brighter. We’ve kind of run away on an adventure that our Aunt Kitty, deceased for three years, detailed in one of her innumerable pocket-size black Moleskin notebooks.

We’d spent the past days going through two hundred of these little journals in which she basically just wrote the minutia of her day to day life over a twenty year span. I mean, they weren’t novels or poems, or even memoir. Some were just notes she’d taken during a library staff meeting, where she’d worked her way up from book shelver to head librarian. I think our Grandma, who suggested that we dig into the journals while she was helping her friend with a broken hip for the next two weeks, might have thought they were something more.

“Girls, I’ve just never been able to bring myself to read them. I just couldn’t.”

After a while we decided that Kitty just loved the feel of these books, the mystic of writing in them. She only used the journalist version, with the soft black cover and the top that flipped up, rather than opened from the side. It was really a bit pathetic is what we felt at first, then as we lay on the bed or slouched on the couch, here and there we found gems, as though she had actually taken a journey, gone on an adventure down the Nile or into the catacombs of Rome or Paris.

The last Moleskin she’d closed out a week before her wedding to Sam. She wrote, “And now, for the real journeys of my new life, marriage, travel, love and adventure! If we choose to never return, whoever reads these journals should seek the treasure that lies within.”

Kitty and her beloved Sam, two people who waited to marry until forty-five, never returned, but not by choice. They were killed in the thirty-car pileup on Highway 99 that fall, heavy fog being blamed, on the second day of their honeymoon.

“The treasure that lies within.”

It was a mystery to us, unless she thought any reader would enjoy all the made up journeys she’d composed over the years. But then something happened. While handling a journal titled “Amazon Adventures” and dated during the summer I would have been five, I decided to slip my fingers down in the tight pocket at the back of the book.Tucked deep inside was a paper thing. I slipped it out. It was a one-hundred dollar bill.

“So, this is the treasure?”

Maddie grinned back, sliding her fingers into the back of the notebook titled, “Journey to the South Pacific” which had notes on the voyages of other explorers.

“Viola!” Triumph!

We started going through every one. In total, we discovered two hundred of the same denomination. We sat fondling these one-hundred dollar bills, basking in guilt and delight. We had twenty thousand dollars! That is a treasure, unexpected, unknown, secret.

“She spent her lifetime jotting down wishes and putting a hundred dollars down on each one. Weird.”

But wildly wonderful.

Obviously we had to do something with these. Both our sets of parents were on a four week cruise together, heading out to Islands in the Pacific, a joint venture to celebrate their anniversaries, they had been married a month apart twenty-five years ago. It was a really big deal, and they had foisted us off on our Grandma, who had now foisted us off on ourselves. It was apparent to us that we were meant to find the money, not because we were going to split it and save it for our college education. But because we were going to take the trip that Kitty would have if she’d ever returned.

It’s Christmas time. We’d seen something like this, and we dug back through the pile of Moleskins. There it is was, “Christmas in New York,” dated ten years in the past. Inside Kitty described a round trip by Amtrak sleeper car to New York City, a week staying at the Plaza, both Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations and shopping.

“Bought something for Mother and both the nieces today,” she’d written. “They’re the most lovely scarves, with gold lettered NYC printed in tiny font all over a deep blue silk. Then I had dinner and went roller skating under the Christmas Tree lightening in Rockefeller Center.”

We acted in the manner that was necessary. We took the bus into downtown Portland, descended upon the Amtrak Station, chatted with the clerk and came away with two roundtrip tickets to New York City, by way of Chicago. We’d splurged, we were paying cash, and reserved a private bedroom for the journey. Then back to Grandma’s House, to pack, write long letters explaining what we were doing, that no one should stop us, we would be fine and call when we arrived. Letters we intended no one would read until we were at least in NYC. Most importantly, we figured out how to secure the ten thousand dollars we were taking with us, sewing bills inside our clothes like out of an old spy movie.

Certain of going undetected at not being around for at least a week, we found ourselves back in Portland the day of our getaway. Shopping and being tailed. We were certain we were being tailed. Or we were feeling guilty as hell!

Then in Chicago we had this feeling all over again, and we saw him, he was the same man we’d seen in Portland. It didn’t matter one could say he was just another tourist on the same journey as we were, that only one train left Portland three times a week to go to Chicago. That only one train a day left Chicago en route to New York City. We were still spooked. And we kept the bathroom stall locked and were suspicious every times someone entered the restroom.

“Excuse me, are you the two girls traveling on the New York City bound train? Named Maddie and Sadie”? A woman’s voice had interrupted our cloud of discomfort.

“Your grandmother called the station just now, asked if we could find you. Evidently a friend of your’s named Ginny got a message from you and called your Grandmother.”

Maddie opened the door a few inches. There was a dignified woman police officer standing outside, a smart phone in her hand, and our grandmother’s face showing up on a FaceTime call.

“Grandma?” I take the phone and almost break out in tears at seeing her dear, dear face.

We have to tell her then, and the two of us try to do so at the same time, with the police woman standing near by and the occasional passenger using the restroom.

Grandma listens to all we’re saying without interrupting. Finally, we’re all talked out.

“You girls have to take this journey. It the best thing you can do with Kitty’s money, take the trip of a lifetime, that is what she would have wanted to have and never did, and now never could. So go ahead.”

“We’ll let you know how it goes,” Maddie mumbles, controlling tears.

Grandmother tells us that we just need to let her know when we reach our location. That she has a smart phone now, just bought it this afternoon, and that we can also text her.

“Let me know how everything happens. Kitty would have so loved this trip. And send photos to me, the salesperson told me that you can do that through texting. I’ll text you so you have my number.”

An hour later, we were feeling safe and women of the world at the same time. Ensconced in our sleeper room, curled up with our blankets, we each sheepishly pull out of our backpack a slim black moleskin and a pen, a gift that Aunt Kitty would send us every Christmas once we reached ten. We had several of these that had gone unused and up until now unappreciated. Those she’d sent were somewhere in a drawer in our bedrooms at home. We’d bought these at the bookstore in the Chicago Train Station.

Leaning against the window, watching the lights of Chicago slowly fade out and the open countryside of Indiana come into view, with lights twinkling in the distances of small towns and farm homesteads, we opened our notebooks and began to record our lives, including the minutia of which our Kitty had been so fond.