“Young man! Young man!”
It was 9am, and I was in a motel in the middle of nowhere New Mexico. I was exhausted and lost in my thoughts, but the woman’s voice – so insistent and unexpected – made me come to. What did she say? I thought. I looked around the room, and realized I was the only person there except for a single woman many tables away. She was un-mistakeably speaking to me. I looked at her more closely. She looked like a normal enough retiree, the kind of person I’m used to seeing anytime I stop at a motel or diner in the middle of nowhere. She wore long gray hair (neatly combed), had deep wrinkles across her forehead and neck (from many years in the sun), held her weight over a pair of broad shoulders, and was wearing a completely forgettable outfit that you might expect to see on the cover of some AAA or AARP magazine.
“Young man.” She said again, now more softly that she’d caught my eye.
Before I could say a word, she got up, walked to me, and sat down in a chair right at the table next to me asked: “Would you help me with a little thing?”
I had a six-hour drive ahead of me to meet my high school friend Andrew outside of Tucson, and I was already running late. I wanted to get going, but figured this would only set me back a few seconds, so I said: “Of course.”
“Oh, bless your heart. Thank you. You see, I need to set up an email account, and I just don’t even know.”
“Wait, what?”
“I just don’t understand technology. It’s complicated.”
I must have been staring at her blankly, dumbly.
She went on: “I need to get home and feed my dogs.”
Excuse me? What did she want again, I tried to remember.
A second went by, she kept looking at me. I couldn’t see the connection.
“Oh!” I said, eureka, “there’s a number for taxis by the front desk. I saw it there last night. You should go over there and call them.”
Problem solved! I thought.
“But I don’t have any money.”
“Do you have a credit card?”
“Oh yes – but you know how it is here. Cabs just take cash here. I don’t have any”
I thought about reaching into my wallet to give her some so I could get away.
“The woman at the desk told me I can call a cab with my phone, but I need an email, and well, you know, technology, this world is so complicated these days, I can’t figure it out at all. I can’t figure out email. So I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have one?”
I looked at her closely. A series of uncharitable thoughts flew through my mind. Was she homeless and looking for money? No, I looked at her clothes. They were clean, ready for that AARP shoot. I looked at her teeth -- all intact. I smelled for signs of alcohol. None. I looked into her eyes – they didn’t look dilated.
Maybe she’s just a clueless old woman, I thought. But how do you survive today without an email address? She must really need help. “Can I see your phone?” I asked. She handed me her Android.
I opened up the browser “Let’s try to google it together.” I suggested.
“What’s that?”
I looked at her again. Is she joking?
I said out loud as I typed it into Google, “How -- do – you -- set up – an – email -- account,” She didn’t seem particularly interested despite my live narration of my internet actions. “Click the top link.” “This is Gmail.” “Follow the link to ‘set-up an account.’”
I finally got her to a page where she had to put in her personal information. “I think you’ve got it from here.” I said cheerily.
I handed the phone back to her and tried again to finish my breakfast. I was relieved when I saw her typing and thought perhaps the conversation was nearing an end, but a moment later I heard her huffing: “Why does it want to know my age?”
“It’s okay” I assured her. “It just wants to know you aren’t a minor. You can put in something fake if you want, but only if you’ll remember it.” She took the phone back. I was shocked to see input a date that suggested she was in her late 50s.
A moment later more huffing: “It says my password won’t work! Can you do it for me?”
I looked over her shoulder and saw her name was “Linda”, and that Google wanted her to make a more complicated password.
“Just type it in again, and add some numbers on the end.” I suggested.
“Oh I can’t think of anything complicated.” She signed loudly as if home from a long day.
“Maybe put your dog’s names plus a number?” I suggested
“Oh, thank you! Bless your heart.”
I went back to my waffle.
A moment passed, she was still staring at the screen, then I saw her pressing the screen over and over: “It won’t let me confirm my password!”
I looked over her shoulder. “Maybe you typed it in wrong the second time.”
“The second time?”
Instead of entering her password a second time, she was pressing place where she being prompted to “confirm password” over and over.
“Um… why don’t you try typing your password in there.”
“Oh my! Sometimes I think I’m just not meant for this world.” she sighed.
When the confirmation page loaded, she yipped. “Oh! It worked! I have an email now! Thank you! I can get home now.”
“Okay, well now you should be set. Just go ahead and order your uber.” I waved as if to signal, good luck, I’m done here. I tried, again, to turn my full attention back to my half eaten, and increasingly cold waffle.
“How do I do that?” she asked the top of my head.
I signed, pushed away my waffle and grabbed the phone back. Of course, there was no Uber App on her phone. How had she known she needed an email? I wondered. But I didn’t care. I just wanted to see this thing through now. I went her app store and tried to download it, but when I did I saw it required her to first log in to her google account.
I handed the phone back to her and said, “Almost there! Just need to re-input your username and password that we just created”
She looked at me, and back at the phone, “Oh no, I don’t know if I remember!”
Are you freaking kidding me? I wanted to yell. But instead, I kept my cool, and said in my most zen like voice: “Hmm, remember it’s your dog’s name?”
“Oh yes!” she called out. But despite repeated attempts to type in her dog’s name. It didn’t work.
I grabbed the phone back and began the process to recover her password.
“Can I ask you a question.” She suddenly asked.
“Umm… sure…”
She looked down at my hand, and pointed to a dark raised dot on the crease between my right thumb and pointer finger. “How did you get that?”
I looked. The truth was I’d seen it for the first time after I’d woken up while camping in the desert two nights before. I had no idea how it got there. “I don’t know actually.”
She looked at me conspiratorially
“Would you think I was strange if I told you something?”
Too late… I thought.
“I got them once too! And I also had no idea where I got them from. You and I are so alike.”
Wait, what?
“It was a few years ago, when I was still with my ex-husband. He was in the air force. Lots of weird things happen with the air force here in New Meixco, you know...” she trailed off. “Well, one day, I was out in my garden in the middle of the day, and then next thing I knew I was inside and it was dark. I don’t know how. And it was at least 4 hours later. That time was just gone. I wasn’t drinking or anything. It was just like I time traveled. So, I went to the bathroom, and I looked in the mirror and I had those same black dots on me just where yours is!”
What is the right and polite thing to say here, I wondered.
While I was contemplating that, she went on: “So, I went to my reiki guru, and you know what she told me?”
“No…?”
“Aliens!”
“Right… that makes sense.”
“I know! Right? There’s a lot of weird things out here the desert.”
“You don’t say…”
Once we were armed with her new username and password, I went to download Uber, only to discover the internet signal was so, so slow that I soon realized there was going to be no quick escape
My waffle was now most definitely cold. Do I still eat it I wondered? Should I just throw it away?
“Oh my goodness. Where are my manners?” ‘Linda’ jumped in: “I never introduced myself. I’m Dionne.”
Wait, what? I wanted to say. I gave her my hand and may have mumbled: “good to meet you.”
She went on: “Who are you? Where are you from?”
Should I answer those questions? I wondered. But something in my Midwest upbringing compelled me forward, and before I knew it I was stammering out, quietly, almost in a whisper: “Tim … from Minnesota.”
“Oh my goodness!” she excitedly yelped, seemingly oblivious to my body language. “I once dated the quarterback of the Minnesota Vikings when I lived in San Antonio!”
I looked at the phone – Uber was less than 10% downloaded.
“It was a long time ago, when Red McCombs owned the team and so the players used to come down and visit Texas all the time. I didn’t know he was the quarterback of course.”
I probably cocked my head. I actually knew that was true, and it was surprisingly specific. Was she telling the truth?
“He was a gentleman.”
I couldn’t help myself: “Hmm, that’s not a word I think of that often when I think about professional football players. But I guess you never really know what people are like from afar...”
“I know, but he wasn’t like that. He was so handsome and kind. I worked in a nice restaurant then. But this was so long ago, back when I was beautiful. Like my daughter looks now.
“He kept coming back to my restaurant. Never pushy or handsy, but we used to talk all the time. We never even kissed or anything. One day, the other girls pulled me aside and said, ‘Do you even know he is? How come he likes you when you don’t even care about sports! He’s a star.’ But of course, I didn’t know who he was. Actually, when I found it out, that made me scared.”
“Scared?”
“Next time I saw him, I asked him straight up, ‘Do you have a wife?’ And he didn’t deny it. He was real calm, and just said ‘yes.’
“Oh no!” I imagined what it must have been like for her. “Men... So, he just wanted a second girlfriend while he was away?”
“No. He told me he wanted to be with me not her.”
I almost choked, wait, what? I had so many questions I wanted to ask, but I held my tongue.
She went on: “I told him I wasn’t interested. But he didn’t give up. He came back, with a dozen roses and a credit card. I told him I didn’t want anything. I threw the card at him.”
I looked at her silently, imagining her 30 years ago, the excitement of the attention, the dreams she must have had, the way they’d been pulled away from her. How much did that gesture mean to her now? When she thought of him, what did she first see? When she thought of his face, was it the look of when he wooed her or when she threw the card away?
“He got that card off the ground and tried to put it in my hand. He told me to keep it. I told him to leave. He said I didn’t owe him anything. Just keep it.”
“I didn’t want his money.”
She trailed off into thought. I’d forgotten I was supposed to be installing her Uber.
Many, many minutes later – when we’d finally got her app up and running, after I’d input her credit card information and found the card contained a third name, neither Linda or Dionne, I asked her to tell me the address of where she wanted to go.
“Oh, can’t I just tell the driver?” she asked.
“No, you need to input it here. Maybe you want to put in your home address?”
“Just have them take me downtown.”
I wanted to ask about her dogs, but decided better not.
“Where downtown? I need an address.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Anywhere on Main Street.”
“I need an intersection at least… please”
“Well there’s an artist gallery there I really like.”
And so it went…
When I finally got called the Uber from her phone, and got her to the lobby door, it was almost 10am. I never got to finish that waffle.
As we stood there, I watched two obviously homeless men walk through the parking lot, their clothes full of holes, their hair turning to dreads, their look wild. I looked back at Linda, or Dionne, or whoever she might be in her neat clothes and combed hair. The world is strange I thought.
It was then that I also first noticed she didn’t have anything with her except her purse. No suitcases, no toiletries. I almost laughed. Why was she at the motel in the middle of nowhere? How did she look so clean and put together without any things to get ready in the morning? How had she even gotten there in the first place? What was her name, actually? Who was this woman!?
When the driver arrived in a Toyota Camry, I looked at the plates and told her it was her ride. She turned, looked back at me, and gave me a smile. “Goodbye, Tim from Minnesota. I need a new phone. Thank you.” She gave me a hug, and got in the car.
As she closed the door, I saw her lean toward the driver and heard her say:
“Hello young man! Can I ask you something?”
