June 29, 2021
You know how yesterday I was thinking about getting a room but decided against it? Why spend 80 or 100 bucks, I said.
Well, a tiredness overcame me later in the day while noshing on some pizza. With urban boondocking I’ve found that I need several power naps throughout the day—especially if I’m highway driving. Nothing so forcefully says You-Need-A-Nap-Now like speeding down the road and feeling like Linda Blair is turning green and twisting her head 360 degrees inside you.
The need for sleep is an animal that won’t be ignored and seems to come on me with a vengeance when operating heavy machinery or driving a car. (I’ve never operated heavy machinery, I’m just pretty sure it would be tough to swing a crane deprived of sleep.) Masticating pizza with too little sleep is doable though. There has to be the imminent danger of death or someone else’s death for sleep to call me out like a possessed demon. Choking on stringy cheese just doesn’t qualify.
So I ruminated some more and it seemed like a good time to throw in the towel—or use someone else’s. I was ready for that shower after all and I was better able to rationalize this extravagance because of a district email I received from my employer saying I was receiving $1500 for something. I couldn’t really understand why I was receiving $1500 but my interest in that sort of detail is more acute when I’m being charged money rather than given it. Which brings me to the next chapter in my journal which is titled:
Wyndham Garden Tallahassee, How Do I Hate Thee: Let Me Count the Ways.
Except I’m going to spare you and not count the ways. I think it says enough that when I began to count the ways to the front desk clerk he began his sentence with, “Well, we aren’t really a Wyndham hotel…”.
The shower was nice at least, although, I did have a foot shoot out on the slippery tub bottom which almost led to a back injury that would have ended this trip forever and, possibly, made it so that I would have to drive a wheelchair with a toggle in my mouth.
I’m trying to remember that there are many wonderful things about Tallahassee and it’s just that this hotel is not one of them, nor the laundromat I went to where I was required to purchase a plastic card for a dollar and then put money on it for the machines that charge 1.99 or 2.99 for wash loads and .52 for every eight minutes on the dryer. Come on people! I don’t mind being ripped off just do it honestly in numbers divisible by five!
Okay, I know that my first-world problems are petty. It’s just, at this point, I kinda wish they were more second-world problems and that I’d decided to stay in my truck and remain smelly.
Let me move on.
I lived in Tallahassee four years. My family did most of its moving—at least the state to state kind—in the summer. I think that’s true for a lot of families who have children and don’t want to yank kids out of school in the middle of the year. Plus, my dad was in the school business.
So my birthday being July 8, I was a new four-years-old when we got here and an old seven-years-old when we left. Keeping track of my ages helps me keep track of where I was and what school I was going to at any given time.
I went to a preschool when we lived at 1234 Pepper Drive, our first place in Tallahassee. A woman with very long fingernails liked to yank me around a lot. Apparently I was a bad kid. Also, nap time was torture and they played Hush Little Baby Don’t Say a Word every day on repeat. I used to lay on my cot unable to sleep thinking what a spoiled brat that kid was—Daddy buying her everything.
Remember how I said I seem to remember the bad things? I suppose trauma makes them memorable. At 1234 Pepper Drive there were three traumas: sitting in a red ant pile, trying to pet a fuzzy bumble bee and sticking my thumb in one of those old-timey metal fans that have about three curved wires as a front grate. I remember what I was saying when I stuck my thumb in there.
“Want me to turn off the fan?” I asked the adults while indicating the fan behind me with my thumb.
It must have been one of those kid things where I wanted to touch a button or click a switch because there is no good reason to turn a fan off in Tallahassee. You pretty much want fans on most of the year.
I met an interesting woman while looking for my house. Cathryn has one of the homes on Pepper and she is really into Tallahassee history. I’d found a home that looked like the one we rented but its address was in the 2000s. There were no homes with addresses in the 1000s. I asked Cathryn about this and she confirmed that all those homes were in a flood zone and were torn down about 25 years ago. Some houses across the street from where our old house used to be are built on stilts. (We’ve gotten downpours every day I’ve been here.)
According to Cathryn the neighborhood was developed in the late 1940s and red-lined then as a blacks-only neighborhood. The area was called Elberta Empire after the Elberta Crate and Box company where many or the residents worked. At the time the wages were good. When we arrived in the summer of 1969 ownership of the company had changed and workers were in the midst of a strike—which proved to be successful—for better working conditions and wages.
Cathryn says there is a huge demand for small, affordable homes in Tallahassee. From what I’ve seen, this city has been good at keeping old neighborhoods like Elberta Empire.
Spotty West Goes East 