Wii

"Did we bring Nigel in from the car?"

-- my mom, asking about the GPS system in the van, which has been set to a British male voice

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Nigel brought my folks to the La Quinta between Great Lakes, IL, and Chicago, in the ritzy stretch of meadow and woods north of the Windy City. The mile-by-mile directions, cordially delivered by the robotic monotone, also aided me as I made my way back south, retracing tread from picking Sharon up at the Naval Training Base. I went west from Cinci into Indianapolis, then a fair distance straight north into the Chicago metro, up the buttcrack of road that is the Skyway, following directions scrawled on the back of a paycheck stub envelope in red felt-tip pen, the letters fat and fluffy in the creases of the seal. Listened to reams of Garrison Keillor stories, from his English Majors collection and from his new novel of Lake Wobegone, Pontoon.

Spoken-word recordings are growing on me. On long road-trips, there's nothing else I'd rather listen to, no songs I already know or songs I've never heard before. Hearing a story or essay or poem, the volume cranked so high you can hear the hiss of speakers in the silence between breaths, the sound filling the car and ricocheting off the insides of the windows, the feeling of the story comes and goes, pacing alongside your imagination, images in step with words, emotions with the storyteller's voice.

When I laugh (which happens a lot, listening to those radio yarns), though, it is short and checked. I feel sheepish and look at my face in the mirror. There is no one to share the joke with but the audience on the track, and I sound loud compared to them. I feel like I've burst too loudly in a church, or something.

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Rice, corn, potatoes, cheese, root beer, and ham for Thanksgiving Dinner, here in the La Quinta Inn & Suites between Great Lakes and Chicago. My plastic fork shattered when I tried to cut my slice of ham. I finger-ate a slice of pie someone had left out. My sister laughed and told me the slice had been in the trash can.

We are Wii-ing. This is my first time. It took three games of bowling to master the flick and the B-trigger button. We spent a half hour editing our Wii selves, toggling hairstyles and looking at the person in question, reevaluating each face and comparing it with the animated caricature on-screen, bobbing blithely with the blithely bobbing music.

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The girls want to get trampled tomorrow, Black Friday, in Chicago. They want to go downtown and crowd around, probably not buying a single thing.