from Crazy Were We in the Head

While I was coming back to Inverness on business, I checked in at a motel after a long day’s drive. I thought I was in Pocatello, but at dinner, just as I was finishing my glass of Chablis, it struck me that I was actually in Gomorrah. When the waitress came with the bill, I tried to make a joke about this, but she’d never heard of Gomorrah. So I dropped the subject, paid for my meal, went back to my room, and got ready for bed. Being tired but not sleepy, I decided to watch a movie. I picked a comedy that was advertised as having “brief flashes of nudity,” but it turned out that the flashes were too brief to keep me awake. As I dozed off I remember wondering what Uncle Edgar would have thought about his oldest nephew spending a night in Sin City. Would enjoying a glass of wine and watching a slightly naughty movie be enough to cancel my reservation for the last reunion?
While I was driving to Inverness the next morning, I got to thinking of those bygone Reisender reunions and about Snake and the orchard and the goats in the backyard and the ghosts in the attic and about all us cousins gathered around Great-grandma, singing her an old German hymn to ease the pain of going home to the Fatherland. Then, as I crossed the dam at Beaver Falls and headed north, I got to thinking about the family secret of what Great-grandma had been doing out in the middle of Asia back in the 1880s and why she’d been married in that mosque. When I graduated from high school and left town, Grandpa finally presented me with the key to the puzzle. So after Aunt Lena filled me in on the details, I finally got the point.