Breakfast time. A mediocre hotel. The continental buffet features food that is only a few notches above prison-camp food.
A youth soccer team forms a line at the buffet. They are filling paper plates with dry bacon and shoe-rubber eggs. I am standing behind them, waiting for my gruel.
I didn’t sleep well last night because of minor back pain.
Long ago, my mother used to say that each naughty thing I ever did would come back to haunt me in the form of back pain. I never believed her as a child. Now I do.
I find an empty table. I am eating breakfast in peace when an old woman asks if she can sit beside me.
And all of a sudden, I’m eating with a stranger.
We are quiet for a few minutes. What should strangers say over breakfast? Conversations about the weather would be shallow. And I don’t feel like discussing politics.
“I’m having a hard time waking up,” she finally says. This starts the conversational ball
rolling.
“When you’re my age,” she goes on, “you don’t sleep good, you’re lucky if you get a few hours. How about you?”
“I had back pain last night.” Then I tell her what my mother used to say about divine back punishment.
She laughs.“You musta been an ornery child.”
“I had moments.”
We are joined by a boy in a soccer uniform who sits beside the woman. She uses sign language to speak to him. He moves his hands in response.
“This is Aaron,” says the woman. “He’s my grandson.”
A girl makes her way toward us. She is older than the boy, tall, lean, with blonde braids. She carries a full plate. I count four biscuits.
If I ate four biscuits, I’d nap like a bear that’s just been shot with a tranquilizer dart.
“This…