Midwestern Nice

I got off the airplane in Milwaukee from New York, shaking hands and exchanging phone numbers with a woman I had met on the plane from Portage. She wrote a book I like. We became friends. Without any pretences or any exchanges of past drug problems or ex husbands or strange obsessions, we just exchanged numbers, like that.

I go to a friends' parent's house. They pour me a glass of wine, they share a few stories. They give me a book. I walk out the door, warm and hopeful.

Men buy me drinks at bars. Because that's what they do.

My old boss from the coffee house gives me a tour of his new roastery. He demonstrates how the beans go from weird green grains to dark brown slices of heaven. He pours me a cup, sends me on my way, no charge.

A friend drives me home late at night after sharing a stack of old high school notes I had written, a stack of solid memories of who I once was, or who I still am, or something.

I watch the football game at my brother's house, and he feeds me, and I play on the floor with my nephew, and I feel the kind of love that I haven't felt in a long time. A love without words, a quiet one.

I find myself lost, and without cell phone service, in the middle of a snow-white Wisconsin farm town. A woman talks to me for a half hour about the Packers, and then tells me where to go.

I laugh on a porch with two friends, discussing how lucrative eBay can be, and we laugh our way through chocolate cake and tears.

I sleep in guest rooms and have clean towels, gifts on pillows and large back yards. Breakfasts on tables and hot tea and conversation. Bottles of shampoo and hugs farewell.

A woman knocks on my car window and asks if the glove on the ground next to me is mine.

I am fed, by the ton, meal after meal, helping after helping, cheese and gyros and spaghetti and double decker tacos and cheese and homemade pizza and burgers and cheese.

I'm offered the remote control, the blanket, the hair dryer, the front seat.

There's a niceness here that I won't find anywhere else. A bubble of sanity or insanity or both. A zone of comfort beyond material. A place to come back to and then leave again and then come back and then leave.