Total Recall

Jerome and Del­phine were in town for a visit. Nor­mally, they stay with us– we have a base­ment room that we fin­ished into a bed­room suite just for them. But not on this trip; they were stay­ing in a hotel instead.

One of the rea­sons was the great water they served at the hotel. I am no great con­nois­seur of H₂O, but after tast­ing it, I can assure you, this was some­thing spe­cial. Jerome insisted I take some home with me. We had a sil­ver bucket and an empty 2 liter pop bot­tle we used to col­lect the water and take it to my house in.

So I was still curi­ous why Jerome would choose to stay at the hotel. Sure, the water was great, but really, there had to be a bet­ter rea­son. He said, “Let me show you,” and he led me in to the back room. He opened the win­dow, and there was the most incred­i­ble view.

It was sun­set, and all the bold col­ors that go with it. Oranges, reds, yel­lows and peaches all poured through the win­dow. The sky– what lit­tle you could see of it– was a deep deep blue, almost black. There was a lot going on out there, work­ers build­ing build­ings, shops sell­ing pro­duce, but the largest, most notice­able object out the win­dow was just a few feet away. It was the tail end of a train. An old train, with dec­o­ra­tive wooden cars. Cars painted greens and reds, trimmed in bright yel­low. Cars that took you back to the golden age of railroading.

The train started to move out. Jerome told me that this was not on the nor­mal track. The train went out this pri­vate spur to the mail rail­road line. As the cars pulled away, I noticed our room was a car, too. We were being set up to be part of the next train. Some­one I know, some­one who was famil­iar to me was the engi­neer. One the other cars were clear, he started to pull our train up onto the siding.

Only there were no tracks on the wood stays. That was fine, our engi­neer was a pro­fes­sional, and he could deal with the sit­u­a­tion. He had, many times before. The ride became very bouncy, and very noisy. As the bounc­ing increased, the loco­mo­tive was thrown off the tim­ber and to the right side. The cars all fol­lowed. Even­tu­ally, we slowed and finally stopped, to wait our turn to go out to the mail line.

Inter­mis­sion

I was in the Sen­ate cham­bers. I was there to watch the Sen­ate recall, cen­sure and remove one of their mem­bers. Every­one knew why. This spe­cific Sen­a­tor had crossed the line, and boldly so. She had done some­thing so egre­gious that the out­come of the hear­ings was a fore­gone conclusion.

And so the hear­ing began. The accused got up to speak in her own defense. She spoke for only a short period, but she was sur­pris­ingly per­sua­sive. She turned the cham­ber around. The charges were dropped.

I went up the street to have lunch. The recently-accused sen­a­tor soon came into the same restau­rant, with four of her friends. They were very loud and com­mand­ing. While they only spoke among them­selves, they were on stage in there, per­form­ing for every­one. And they were pompous, and very annoying.

The woman who had turned around the hear­ing was quite firm in her con­vic­tion that, while the charges were true, she was so smart, she could beat them. To her, the out­come was a for­gone con­clu­sion because of her per­sonal skills as an orator.

It did not take long for those of us present to turn against her. What had once been seen as a vic­tory for the under­dog, and come from behind win, was now seen as a hol­low vic­tory. We could now see what this woman was really like, and we were not happy. I dis­cussed it with the woman next to me, and she said that there was noth­ing we could do. So true.

As I got up to leave, I had to walk around the woman senator’s table to get out. Just as I was pass­ing, a light went off, sig­nal­ing that Con­gress was about to recon­vene. The Sen­a­tors made me stop and wait for them to get up and leave before I was allowed to continue.

I woke up.