Day 2921
I set an ice cream sandwich on the counter. That and a gallon of gas comes out to six dollars.
“Is there a guy named Bo who hangs around here sometimes? Older guy.”
The attendant perks up at the question. “Do you know his last name?”
“No… I met him here a while back. Said he’d lived in French Camp a long time.”
“Maybe Bo Hendricks.” She shows me a picture on her phone. A young, round man with burnished skin and short hair surrounded by friends with red cups.
“No, he told me he’d lived in French Camp longer than I’ve been alive. I’m 31.”
“There’s lot’s of Bo’s here.”
She and another attendant show me some more Facebook profiles, but none of them look old enough.
“I met him when I stopped here eight years ago. Probably won’t remember me, but I guess if a really old Bo comes in, could you tell him the motorcycle guy from Seattle said, ‘Hi’?”
They agree skeptically, and I go to sit down outside. A chatty truck driver with a Mr. Pibb and another man are sitting in the spot where Bo sat down next to me almost a decade ago, so I take the bench across from it. They go back and forth, speculating about gas prices, the weather, the occasional short mention of politics. Other than that, it’s quiet. Just the wrapper from my ice-cream sandwich crinkling, the grunt of distant diesel engines rolling by.
People filter in and out. It’s the sort of place locals pull up and leave without having to pay—the attendant quietly notes it on a credit sheet. Just four mechanical pumps, a large awning over them providing shade.
This is the first time I’ve crossed with my 23-year-old self. Here in a small, unrecognizable town in Mississippi where I once nearly ran out of gas, where I ended up sharing a seat with a complete stranger for... ten minutes? Maybe less. Hearing the story of how he stumbled on this remote town, how he knew that he wanted to stay for the rest of his life, was like being given permission to want stability for myself. He was the first person I’d ever met who stayed in one place not because he had settled, but because that place resonated with his soul.
No one comments on me or the motorcycle, or the Washington license plate today. After ten minutes or so sitting in uncomfortable silence, I slide the helmet back on. I don’t snap a picture of the building, even though I want to. These folks wait for city-dwellers to betray their perception of the south. To most outsiders, it is simply an object of fascination, not so much for its culture, even but for its poverty and perceived backwardness. I just snap a picture of a small flower sprouting from a crack in the cement, trying to catch the store logo painted in the window on the edge of the frame -- “Leonard’s 3-Way Grocery”. Then I leave.
I couldn’t have told you a single thing about how this building looked before today--the memory had completely gone, but I nearly burst into tears behind the helmet’s visor when I rounded the corner and saw it today. It had been sitting in a place in my heart the whole time, not my head .And I realize as I roll away that this memory is also likely to fade. That I have no idea if I will ever find myself riding through Mississippi again, that I might never lay eyes on Leonard’s 3-Way Grocery after today.
I get a quarter mile down the road before cursing my own faintheartedness and swinging the bike back around. I stop in the median just in front of the station and take three quick photos, knowing the chatty truck driver and his friend are probably watching.
I wonder if I’ve gotten more self-conscious in the last eight years.
No sooner is the camera tucked away in my tank bag than drops of rain begin to tap on my helmet. Then, in an instant, they’re monstrous, tragic balls of water and I’m scrambling to pull the bike back under the shelter of the station’s awning. Some of it’s coming through holes in the roof, but I’m staying dry. The attendants and customers all gather outside. Five minutes prior it was bright and blue and peaceful, and now it’s just din—the sky crumbling down around us, them and I. We watch in in silence until a thin woman, about five feet tall in a lifeless dress, shuffles out next to the bike.
“You were asking about a Bo?” I can barely hear her over the rain, so I lean in. She turns her back to me. I think she’s noticed the camera on my helmet, but she continues to talk. “Pretty sure I know who you’re looking for.”
“Really? I met him here a while back. Lived in French Camp a long time, seemed like he probably killed a lot of time here at the gas station.”
“Yep, that’s Bo Lott. Came down with cancer and left to be back with family in Alabama. He died a couple years ago.”
My heart sinks. Even though the odds were slim, I thought I’d see him again. When you’re traveling on a motorcycle you occasionally trick yourself into believing you occupy some miraculous part of spacetime where such improbable things are possible.
“Dang. I was hoping I might be able to hi. He was a friendly guy.”
She lights up the cigarette, her back still mostly turned to me. “Yeah, he drank a lot. Struggled.”
“He sat down next to me on that bench eight years ago and just wanted to talk.”
“He was a good man,” she says, but in the way you say it about anyone who has died. The rain lets up and small rainbows are starting to sprout from the last vestiges of the tumult.
I think I’ve become softer, rounder, in the last eight years, though not necessarily larger. My elbows, my jaw, the way I approach conversation with less contention. I’m better at it, I think, than I was at 23. Fewer people dive headlong into a conversation with a 31-year-old, but Bo would have. And if he were here now, I would have stayed to talk for more than ten minutes. I’ve become accustomed to the fear inside me of other people, and their perceptions, I can dance with it, direct it towards something meaningful.
I’ve become near-sighted, but don’t mind that too much, either—I slide my glasses into my helmet before each ride and they keep the bugs out of my eyes when the visor is up. I can’t read the signs people put out on their lawns, but I get close enough most of the time to hear them actually speak their mind.
I feel less than I used to. It’s sad, but I know it’s true. When I was last here, the time, these spaces, they fertilized something in my core, brought something budding out from inside me. There was a person in there to discover, a relationship with the world, and I was ready and willing to yank out it, to feel the grit under my nails and hear the roots snap as I pulled.
That trip was the most important thirty days of my life. Now I’m here, holding onto it, wondering what evolution looks like when you’ve found yourself, when you’ve reached your destination but haven’t escaped the nagging sense that you need to continue moving, that old ghost which once propelled you, carried you, like a deceased partner, always there, looming over you like a specter you know you’ll never shake.
