Day Twenty (Friday, July 16, 1971)

I enjoyed a mattress below my belly, a pillow at my head, and fresh sheets buffed against my body. Betty used pastel-striped bedsheets, much more fanciful than my mother’s endless supply of plain white. Solitude was heaven. No cops would be rooting me out here. It was helpful to distance myself from Otto as well.

“No one should take a bed for granted!”

I was playing. It was pretentious to presume that going a couple of weeks without basic necessities was a “long time.” People survived ordeals much more demanding than this journey. It had been my choice to live sparsely; I could hardly claim being thrust into dire hardship. No bed, so what? Same as with not taking a shower. Or eating meals. Or wearing clean clothes. What did I have to complain about?

Twenty days wasn’t even three full weeks. “Go a year or more, Winans. Then you’ll have something to write about.”

I appeared at the dining room door, figuring Ralph already would be at work. But there he was, dressed like a gentleman farmer in tan slacks and a yellow-checkered shirt, sitting at the table with his legs crossed, writing in a pocket notebook. He stood up when he saw me. “Well!”

His grip was like an iron clamp. Yeah, that was him. Big Poppa. Tall and strong, gray hair and glasses, long vertical face, thin lips, smiling a bit painfully through dentures. An aging giant.

“How’s the cross-country wayfarer?”

“Good enough!” I rubbed my eyes and yawned. “I haven’t slept like that since I left home. Thanks for the hospitality.”

“Well, that bed ought to feel better than winging it in your sleeping bag. You can sleep all day long around here if you want. It’s your vacation. We have a big, nineteen-inch color TV, and I’m sure my good wife will tell you all there is to do in town, if she hasn’t already. Here, sit down.” He slid his papers to the opposite side of the table and switched chairs.

Betty was in the kitchen, fully dressed, barraging me with breakfast offerings. I elected to wait for Otto. In the meantime I received coffee (I considered it my first “official” cup), accompanied by Hawaiian Punch.

“You know, when I was about your age,” Ralph began, “I bicycled out to Sequoia National Forest with my stepbrother and another friend. It’s a place about an hour’s drive from here in a car. The three of us stayed a full week, pitching a tent, eating out of a sack, and had one heck of a time.” He smiled and shook his head. “I thought that was a big deal, but not compared to what you’re doing. This safari of yours across the United States ought to be national headlines.”

The coffee was scalding hot.

“Where’s your buddy?” Ralph asked. “Still in the sack?”

“I walked past there a minute ago and he was dead to the world,” Betty declared.

“You guys must’ve been pretty tired,” Ralph chuckled. “It was only ten o’clock when I got home last night, and both of you were konked out.”

“Is that coffee too hot, Roger?”

“I like it hot.”

Betty sat down with her own coffee, poised with a lighter at the tip of her Parliament. “If you don’t like that, I’ve got tea, orange juice, pineapple juice, carrot juice, milk, grapefruit juice, health juice made with barley, or Coke. Speak up.”

“I’m fine. Really.”

Ralph walked into the kitchen, joking that getting a refill on his coffee was the only thing he knew how to do for himself in the kitchen. He was playful and cheery. Personalities don’t change much over the years, I remembered. He was exactly like that when we first met—an overgrown kid. No wonder Betty married him.

Otto appeared in the doorframe wearing a wrinkled stripped shirt and white pants. In the same quacky way he answered the telephone, he mumbled, “Hel-low?”

“Well good morning there!” Betty said.

Ralph extended his long arm. “I’m Ralph Serridge.” Though Otto was 6'3", Ralph towered over him. He was probably 6'7". Betty headed straight for the refrigerator.

“Sit down and make yourself comfortable there, fella,” Ralph said.

“Roger wanted to wait for you for breakfast. He got Hawaiian Punch and coffee. Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“I’ll take orange juice,” Otto said.

Ralph was all smiles. “Hear that, Betty? ‘Are-ange’ juice. What a diphthong. We got a couple fellas from New Jersey here. You can tell that.”

Otto and I gave our new friends a synopsis of the trip while eating scrambled eggs mixed with cinnamon, and toast. Ralph, especially, commented on our every move with amazement. A protest march in Chicago, camping at the Mississippi, an overnight ride with two Indian girls, for starters, perked his ears. By the time I got to the part about me delivering Starla’s baby, both my relatives were agape.

“You just handed the baby back to the mother and then kept right
on traveling? My stars,” Betty said.

“You’d better frame the teeshirt that you wiped your hands on,” Ralph added. “That’s your proof.”

Otto spoke about eluding the cowboys in Wendover.

“For either that or the baby alone you guys should be on the cover of Life magazine,” Ralph said. “Gadzooks.”

They related their own experience riding the San Francisco cable cars. They loved the colorful, steep-street imagery and referred to it over and over as I touched upon other adventures.

“New Jersey to California—by thumb. Jiminy whillikers,” Ralph said. “We got a couple celebrities in the house, Betty. We’d better treat these guys good.”

“Three or four hundred miles a day in an air-conditioned car would be my limit,” Betty said.

Ralph turned to Otto. “Let’s get straightened out on this name business. Is your name George Otto or Otto George?”

I laughed while Otto blushed. His backwards-forwards name was always a sensitive point with him. I thought it pegged him exactly, but he sounded embarrassed.

“The second way.” He wouldn’t look up.

“How’d you ever come up with a name like that?” Ralph laughed.

“Parents. It was their idea.” “You don’t realize how lucky you are, boy. Names like that are
useful. Your folks were smart. You can pull a switcheroo if you want, say, if the loan sharks are ever after you. Otto George becomes George Otto. See? I wish I could do that.”

“Oh Ralph Serridge.” Betty slapped his shoulder. “Stop being a silly donkey. You don’t have any loan sharks after you. Otto sounds like a German name if I ever heard one.”

“My mother was Irish,” Otto said. “I don’t even know the origin of our last name—Betty, do you?”

“You’re equal parts English, Welsh, Irish, and Flemish. Holy crap. Your parents are something—never discussing your heritage. But you didn’t hear me say that.”

Ralph clipped his pen into his shirt pocket and stood up. “Well, the gals at the office are going to be wondering where I am if I don’t stop playing hooky and get down there.” He approached his wife. The two of them did something I’d never seen my parents do: They kissed, right out in the open.

Ralph ducked out the door with a wild, happy expression, holding onto his hat. Betty looked over with a smile. “You’ve got to watch that guy, that he doesn’t get too nutty.”

“He’s got locomotion.”

“He can sling the blarney with the best of them,” Betty said. “But you didn’t hear me say that, either.”

Holding these truths to be self-evident, knowing that every American is created equal with certain unalienable rights, Otto and I lived the day in comfort, peace, and enjoyment. And scoffed down everything from avocado to kiwi to lime pie—but holding the rhubarb.

“Dear Mom, From Heartland to Farmland to Bread Basket to Happy Belly in Hanford, CA. Love, Otto” (his daily scribble back home)