Posts by Jonah

That’s what happened at our house last night, no joke. We hosted a quartet of couchsurfers yesterday. In their request they said they understood if we could only host a couple of them, but we assured them we had plenty of room for all four.  When they arrived, we all introduced ourselves: Max (male) from Germany, Sara (female) from Spain, and Misha and Beata (both female) from the Czech Republic.  We told them again what their sleeping options were, and after what appeared to be some panicky internal deliberations, Sara and Beata elected to bunk in the upstairs queen bed and Misha informed Max that she did not mind sharing the downstairs queen bed with him. (To be fair, I had offered them all the option of the couch and the air mattress too.) The whole situation amused Berck greatly.

As Berck and I worked on preparing dinner, we asked our couchsurfers how they knew each other.  It turned out that they did not.  Amongst a variety of websites, the four of them (there was a fifth, a Russian, who had left the day before) had met online with the intention of all gathering in Denver to pool their resources to rent a car together and see as much of the United States as they could in one week. They said they had driven 3,000 miles, and tonight was their last night in the US.  They were flying out of Denver the next day.

Before dinner, Berck took everyone down to the kegerator and gave them tastes of all of his beers so they could choose which one they would like a glass of.  This activity proved very popular with our guests.

They had warned us that two of them were vegetarians, so Berck made bread and pasta with tomato cream sauce and I made Caesar salad and peach cobbler.  Usually, Berck makes his pasta dish with lots of red pepper to make it spicy, but because we knew a German was joining us, he held back this time.  Max thanked him for making it mild and said it was still very spicy for him but also still delicious.

We ate and laughed, and Berck and I told stories of our European backpacking adventures, Berck about his random Norwegian Rastafarian host, me about how, whenever I got into trouble, I was rescued by Japanese girls.

Then Sara asked, “Is that a telescope?” And that’s how we ended up in the middle of our street looking at Saturn’s rings and the Andromeda Galaxy. None of them had ever had a good look at the Milky Way before, and I pointed out Cassiopeia, Polaris, and the Dippers.  We saw a meteor. We were probably annoying our neighbors, all talking in the middle of the street in the middle of the night, when Sara pointed to the Pleiades rising and exclaimed, “I can see that one from Spain too!”

It was such a fun night, and the Professor loved having so many people to show off his feather toy catching skills to.

There’s a risk to couchsurfing. And I don’t mean the ax-murdering type risk; that’s so remote as to be laughable.  There’s a risk that we rush around cleaning the house and cooking for someone who doesn’t actually show up.  Or the risk that the folks who do show up are homeless freeloaders who use six bath towels and three rolls of toilet paper between the two of them in one night.  Or worst yet, that our guests are utterly boring.

But then there’s the possibility of six random strangers from all over the world, sitting around a table, drinking, eating delicious food, talking, laughing, and just enjoying a wonderful evening together.

And it’s even better if you’ve got a telescope handy.

I was driving home from work today through the Broadmoor area, which is the nicest part of town. Construction on my exit on the Interstate was finally completed, but then construction started on Highway 24 through the city.  So it’s still much more pleasant (and possibly faster) to drive through the Broadmoor.

I took a right on 3rd to take my shortcut over to Cresta and noticed a critter in someone’s front yard.  At first I thought, “Why would that giant black dog be wandering around loose?”

And then I realized it was not a dog.

The little bear turned her head to glance at me as she continued to walk on her way away from the road.  I’m guessing she was female because she was small, but I really have no way of knowing for sure.  Her shiny black eyes mirrored her sleek black fur.  Our gaze met for only a moment as I marveled at how beautiful she was.  Then we passed and each kept going, me on my way home and she, most likely, to the next available trash can.

I’m guessing the secret to her gorgeous coat is the high quality garbage in the Broadmoor.

The boss let us go home early today.  She likes to do that on Fridays before holiday weekends.

Berck was still busy at work, so I stopped by the grocery on the way home to pick up mushrooms and peppers.  Berck complains that he can’t cook ANYTHING if he doesn’t have mushrooms or peppers handy, so I try to have some in the fridge each weekend.  Then I toss them in the garbage in a week when they’ve gone bad.

Traffic was nuts, even at 2:00 p.m., so I decided to stop at the King Soopers on Uintah.  As I was walking up to the front door through the parking lot, I had to swing around the back of a giant, ancient, mustard yellow Oldsmobile Tornado, pulled all the way up to the handicapped sign.  (I now know it was an Oldsmobile because I eventually found it on Google.  Searching for “tornado” and “cars” on Google leads to a lot of photos of storm devastation, which was not helpful.)   They just don’t make cars like that anymore, with proud rear ends that announce themselves so loudly.

What kind of gas mileage does that get, I wondered.  I’m sure it was designed before the gas embargo.

As I walked by, I noticed the windows were down, and the driver was lounging in the front seat, undoubtedly waiting for his passenger to finish their shopping trip inside.

Then I caught the unmistakable whiff of cigar smoke.

Because if you’re gonna sit in your Tornado in a handicapped spot at the grocery, of course you’re gonna be smoking a stogie.

When I was in grade school, we had a class where we’d write journal entries and our superintendent would have various students read aloud their entries to the rest of the school.  The favorites were the ones written by the older kids that were obvious rip-offs of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew mysteries, substituting the names of their classmates.  We’d beg for the next installments to hear what happened.

No one ever asked for me to read my writing.

I wasn’t a very good writer and never had anything terribly interesting to write about. Also, I was a little kid.

One day on the way home from church, my dad made a right turn off our route home, then another right turn down a one-lane driveway.  “Let’s see where this goes!” he said.

Looking back, I’m sure my dad knew exactly where it went.

Dad knew things.  He knew that the tiny gas station with filthy restrooms halfway between our house and my grandparents’ house stocked Yoohoo.  He knew that the vending machine in the workshop of the construction company where he worked had grape Nihi, even though the button you had to mash to get one was just handwritten in.  He also knew that if you shimmied along between the side of the workshop and the fence separating the construction company’s lot to the next door neighbor, you’d come to an apple tree brimming with delicious apples with a branch than overhung the fence and you could pick all the apples you wanted at will.

He had  to know about the long driveway leading to the south with tree limbs overhanging, the weeds growing up tall between the tire tracks.  When you’re a kid and don’t know how to drive a car, if you think about it, a one-lane drive is treacherous.  What if a car comes up the other way?  Will you crash?  Will you come to a standstill?  Will one of the cars have to back up the whole way?  What if the driver isn’t that great at backing up?  Will you crash? Etc.

We drove what seemed like miles, the bright sun disappearing behind the thick canopy of live oak limbs overhead.  Finally, Dad stopped the car.

We got out and stepped into an overgrown garden.  A gigantic fountain lay dry in the center of the garden.  Horticulture and weeds jockeyed for position in the sun’s rays.  This garden had clearly once been splendid.

Beyond the garden was the most beautiful house I had ever seen.  It was tall, stately, ornate, and at the same time decrepit  and a little creepy.  It was huge.  Even in the bright southern sun, it seemed cold and foreboding.

“Let’s take a look around!” my dad said.  My mom, always game for a bit of adventure, began peeking in windows. It was no use. All we could see was darkness inside.

My parents chatted about how much the mansion was worth.  “How would you like to move into that?” my dad asked, obviously rhetorically.

No creatures emerged to assault us.  No ghosts appeared. Nothing bad happened.  When we had looked around at everything there was to see, we piled back in the car to continue our journey home.

Still, this was the most exciting thing that had happened to me in months.  I couldn’t wait to write about it in my writing class.  Maybe I’d even get called on to read it out loud.  I was contemplating the adjectives I’d use.  The house was just so beautiful.  I mentioned all of this out loud.

“Oh,” my dad said, “No, don’t tell anyone about this.”  While tramping around an abandoned out-of-the-way mansion wasn’t illegal, it isn’t the sort of thing you want to go around advertising.

That week I wrote about something else.  Mushrooms, maybe.  Or socks.

(I should probably point out to my parents that I am now publishing this story publicly.)