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A Thousand Singing Chi-Os
Shortly before midnight in Evangeline parish, Louisiana, I started dozing so I exited the interstate onto a farm to market road and drove about a mile until I came to a church parking lot. I backed up to a magnificent live oak tree, reclined my seat back, and tried to forget the last time, more than twenty years previous, when sleeping in a different truck in a San Jose, CA. church parking lot had led to my narrowly escaping a prison sentence in Huntsville, TX. I slept badly, with restless abandon, and when I did awake after two hours I was covered in a film of cold, thick, heavy sweat. And I was still way too tired. I drove back to the I-49, found a proper rest stop a few miles up the road and pulled in under the mercury vapor lamps across from the big boys with their diesel engines offering sweet lullaby. I slept until five a.m. when the muffled alarm on my cell phone packed away in my bag went off.
I put back on the too-small black dress shoes and although I did not fasten my too-small charcoal suit pants I made sure the sufficiently long tail of my white dress shirt covered the fact that my pants and belt were undone. I hobbled to the brick building which offered his/hers restrooms, did my thing, came back out and for five minutes tried to get a moist, flimsy dollar bill into the slot of the Coke machine. Patience was ultimately rewarded and after the fortieth attempt the machine took my money–and immediately spit back four quarters. The machine though would not accept it’s own quarters in payment so I took them to an adjacent machine and used them to buy a damn Coke. Squinting in the darkness I also hoped that E-9 was in fact E-9, which is was, glory be to God, the spiral mechanism released an Almond Joy candy bar.
I was checking out a false dawn to my left as I drove through Opelousas into Lafayette, where I would burn a doobie in anticipation of a spectacular sunrise, and could catch the I-10, elevated over swamp, into New Orleans.
At the wedding in Shreveport I was buzzing on only my second glass of wine so it was then I decided to go, before I found myself staggering to the dance floor and breaking through the interlocked arms of what seemed to be a thousand singing Chi-Omegas. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good Chi-Omega, am in fact myself a former neighbor and honorary member of the Chi-Omega sorority, but don’t get me started.
On the way out I tried one last time to get a lovely fifty-year-old Tri-Delt to show me the secret handshake but she was adamant–“No! In thirty years I haven’t even showed my husband that.” So that’s the way that goes. There are things some of us will never know.