Anyway, to make a long story short, the clerk and I had the sort of conversation that you might imagine we would’ve had, because it wasn’t remarkable in any way, except perhaps for its friendliness, and even then it wasn’t so remarkable, because clerks in motels are, in my experience, not very often unfriendly, especially if you make an attempt to be friendly with them.

The consequence of which is that I sometimes impersonate a person, rather than simply be a person. Which isn’t to say that my impersonation is in bad faith.

Though if you were to ask me what my character or personality was, I don’t think I’d be able to tell you. I often feel that something is missing from me, that I am absent of some necessary thing that everyone else has been given.

I’m quite an unmotivated person, when it comes down to it, and I’ll often say things I don’t mean, or make utterances that aren’t in keeping with my character, or personality, simply because I want to pass the time, or advance a conversation.

Not that I was actually intending to go anywhere for a drink, once I’d obtained the key to my room, and had found my way to it.

Though I think the phrase that I happened to use, in that moment, was ‘where could I get a drink drink’.

This in response to a question I’d asked about where a person such as myself could procure an alcoholic beverage, if that person were inclined to do so.

By which he meant across the highway, on the far side of the overpass.

“The Applebee’s across the way has a bar you can sit at,” I remember is one of the things he said to me.

He might have enjoyed hearing that, one never knows, but he also might have found the information strange, or untoward.

Which was why, when I was making small talk with the clerk inside the lobby of the motel, as I was checking in, and he began to tell me about the surrounding area, which was where he happened to have grown up, I actually listened to what he was saying and asked him one or two follow-up questions, and tried to commit to memory everything that he said, though I didn’t tell him that the reason I was doing so was because I was ‘gathering material’ for a book, and that he and the things that he was saying might end up in the book, in some form or another, were I to actually complete it.

All of which is to say that, yes, I wanted to write about something, wanted to find some subject to write about, even if it wasn’t much of a subject, in terms of importance, but had to do merely with place, or weather, or time of day, et cetera; some insignificant subject, in other words (in comparison to others); something rather innocuous, so that I could persuade myself to try and put some words on a page, without thinking too much about what those words might be, or what they might suggest, or point toward; and thus begin to make some progress on the book I was supposed to be ‘gathering material’ for, even if I didn’t appear to be gathering material at all, at least not in the sense of being, say, investigative, or ground-breaking, or anything marginally exciting, but instead was just a guy in a motel room with his laptop, writing about where he was, and what his day had been like, and what he thought or felt about what his day had been like, and so on.

One of which notions or observations was that I ought to write about this place, this region, whatever you wanted to call it, not a town precisely but something approximating a town, a settlement of commercial buildings on the outskirts of the city I’d just driven through, the one where the traffic had been awful, though not endless, and where I’d started to pray the rosary in my mind (without my beads) but had not completed it, on this late afternoon in summer, when the weather was pleasant, hot, sunny, with an occasional breeze, a beautiful Midwestern day, in other words, if indeed I was already in the Midwest, which I think I was.

In the parking lot of the motel, which was just off the highway, so that you could see and hear the interstate if you looked in its direction, and could contemplate it or listen to it or whatever, I stood for a while next to my vehicle, with my backpack slung over my shoulder, and my phone in one hand, and did precisely that — took in or absorbed the feeling of the place where I happened to have stopped, and tried not to think about anything, and in fact seemed to myself to not be thinking about anything except whatever notions or observations flitted through my mind.

Or, anyway, details that are helpful and edifying, if not necessary. (Can anything be said to be ‘necessary’ in a piece of writing such as this?).

It was summer, I should say, I don’t think I’ve mentioned that. I’m not very good at including details that are necessary to whatever story I’m trying to tell.

At which point I began to look for a motel or a hotel to stop at for the night, because I realized I was tired of driving, even though it was still light out and the sun would not go be going down for two or three hours, and even though, as well, I was not yet done praying the rosary, in my head.

Although, now that I think of it, there isn’t much left to describe. The stop-and-go traffic continued for another ten minutes, then began to speed up, and soon I was on the far side of the city.

I hadn’t mentioned Alida till now, so you’re probably wondering who she is, and why I mentioned her by name, and I intend to tell you, I just need a moment to finish describing the scene I’d been in the middle of describing before I’d made this aside.

Later that evening, when I stopped at a motel and called Alida to tell her where I was, and to say hello, and to let her know how the first day of my trip had gone, and so on, she confirmed for me that indeed I had left the rosary beads on the table in our apartment where I sometimes place them when I don’t have them in the pocket of whichever pair of shorts or jeans I happen to be wearing, and said she’d noticed them only a few minutes after I’d left, and that she’d thought of texting me to see if I wanted to come back for them, but that she’d decided against it because she’d checked my location on her phone and had seen that I was already several blocks away, and had figured that she’d let me go on my way and return for them of my own accord if I happened to notice that I didn’t have them before I got very much farther away.