Third Day in America....

....and I was almost overcome with the space and exuberance of all this, the optimism, and of the beautiful neo-classical Denver Union Railway Station, the huge hallway with the high-backed old wooden benches. And the aging security guard and his very young partner came over and talked to us of their times at war, his in Vietnam and hers in Iraq, and of the thousands and thousands of people who had passed through here and might have rested on these benches for a while (as he had done 40 years ago on his way to Vietnam) before continuing only God knows where.

And I was swept with the sadness of empty railway stations, of ghosts, and might have wept then instead of now, tonight, except that I was considering that I maybe had jet lag, a kind of shakiness, which I was experiencing then, and gratefully into the future, as something quite generally not bad, not un-pleasant, more like being drunk before dinnertime on a Christmas Day and not some ordeal like I'd been told to expect....

....and we walked over, not far away, and booked into The Melbourne Hotel that looked like it had not been re-decorated since 1942, just kept clean, and books continually added, and real paintings and old table lamps and chandeliers, and we met, in the shared kitchen, a young traveling carpenter who looked exactly like a wandering (or could've been lost) Golden Greek God, or like the Beach Boys would have looked if they'd ever looked as good as they sounded.

And downstairs, outside in the evenings, homeless people of reckless style queued and waited for the shelter and yelled to the monster Kenworths, paused at the red traffic lights, to blast their horns and cheered them when they did while Mexican families gathered on the same sidewalk for the long distance buses that would take them home, those hundreds of miles of dying-young roads and across the border.