This Story Would Be Much Better If I Had Pictures

I went to a Very Small Town for work this week.  It’s a takes a bit over three hours to get there from here and I had to go up on Monday afternoon, which happened to be Valentine’s Day.  I knew this when I left, but after three (plus) hours on the road, I sort of forgot.

Just outside of Raton there are several miles of open grassy plains that glimmer spectacularly in the afternoon sun.  The dried grass was a carpet of gold, perfectly edged by the mountains in the distance.  By the time I got to my hotel, the Very Antiseptic Holiday Inn Express, I was actually feeling kind of zen and peaceful.

Now judge if you must, but after three hours in the car, I wanted to have dinner and I wanted dinner to be accompanied by a beer.  These wants eliminated the fast food places as possibilities, if I hadn’t mentally eliminated them already. So I asked the HI Express folks to recommend a place for dinner.  They gave me three options – the only non-fast-food places in town, really.  The parking lot of the first one was full, so I drove down the block and found the same situation at the other two.  Weird, I thought.  But then I remembered: V-Day.  The exterior of the first place was the best of the three (which is saying very little for it, unfortunately) so I went back there.

It had a little “country store” to walk through on the way to the dining room.  As I approached the entryway to the dining room, my visual field was assaulted by the prevalent décor color, mauve, which was dotted with poufs of white hair and hunched shoulders.  I had chosen the Oldie McOlderson place.  I was starting to politely retreat when a poufy-haired lady wearing a sweatshirt with a pattern of hearts, faded from dozens of washings, moved toward me.  I smiled and said, “I was just looking for a place for dinner, but it looks like you’re full.”  Still backing away. 

 

She said, “Oh, we’ll find room for you.  Would you mind sitting at the bar?”

The bar! Great! That must be different, right?  

Wrong.  She led me to a small bar in the corner of the large dining room, past a freckle-scalped man who was playing a piano. Ambiance, I guess.  The bar, I’m certain, had been made as a final project for the local high school’s shop class many years ago.  The outer edge was padded in mauve vinyl.   The padded edge was huge, forcing me to contort my upper body and arms over it to reach the surface of the bar.

I chose one of the only things on the menu that wasn’t a 24-oz beef slab and didn’t have “breaded” in the description – fish.   And I ordered a beer.  And as I sipped it, feeling the bifocaled eyes of the room on me, the piano guy started to play “Are You Lonesome Tonight.”

Really.

As it turns out, the restaurant owners just forgot to mention that the fish was heavily breaded.  It was served with a baked potato (still in the foil wrap), a single 1-inch  cube of cantaloupe (???) and a side of broccoli stems.  That’s right, just the stems.  Not a floret to be found.  And a big white dinner roll that had obviously been baked at a factory several weeks earlier.  I imagined that the elderly dinner guests were speculating that I’d earlier gone home to find a heart-shaped Whitman’s Sampler addressed to another woman, and after confronting my boyfriend/husband, I’d shot him in a jealous rage and heaved him into the trunk of my car.  And then I stopped at this place for a final dinner before hitting the highway, Mexico-bound.

Small towns can screw with your head.

I drank the beer, picked at the dinner, went back to the hotel and bought a package of M&Ms from the vending machine.  Then I went back to my room, sat on the bed, and flipped through magazines while watching back-to-back episodes of Intervention.  Exchanged a few lovey texts with my husband and went to bed.

I don’t think Hallmark makes a card that covers this particular Valentine experience.

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