Cris was driving her daughter and some of her friends to a youth group thing in Bellingham. She asked me if I wanted to go and I said I did because I wanted to get out of town, away from everyone and everything. She said she might need me to drive, to which I said great, I'll drive the whole way because I love to drive and would like to drive something other than the Falcon. She let me do it. She has a minivan which I have driven before on the wide freeways and endless two-laners between here and the southwest. It is bulky, catching wind like a giant sail and it rides on some kind of floaty suspension that gives me the feeling the vehicle is always this close to being out of my control. The turning radius is too large to calculate. Kids in the back were noisy, talking so loud I wondered why in the hell they needed to talk like that and biting my lip to keep from telling them to shut up because they were distracting me from driving this large box on wheels. They painted their nails and I got sick from the fumes even though I said, "It's a good thing I'm driving or I'd be sick." I opened my window for fresh air until the toxic odor was sufficiently diluted. Cris and I talked about stuff we like to discuss together - current topics that have been lacking because mostly I just talk to myself and those conversations always put me in the center as all-important protagonist and everyone else acts perfectly in the way I wish them to be. She asked me what I thought about impeachment proceedings. I started to say my thing when a voice from the back interjected: Impeachment doesn't mean to remove from office; it only means "to bring charges against!" Thank you for the government lesson, now what was I saying? They all had their opinions of course, which weren't really theirs because it was clear the ideas weren't developed and the delivery of the statements, when voiced, sounded suspiciously adult - even with the frustration a dad, obscured by a wall of newsprint, might exert across a dinner table. She started to ask me what I thought about that guy who is scheduled to die for a most terrible triple murder. I said no brainer: He shouldn't die. I'm opposed to the death penalty, and Cris said she was too. I started to list my reasons and when I said something about people who believe in God undermining His proprietary authority over "forgiveness" by allowing a State to judge and condemn, she got a tad defensive. We skirted the discomfort quickly and eventually concluded on a common belief that violence will never cease as long as there is socially sanctioned violent retribution for individual violent acts. In town we searched for food, fruitlessly, for an hour. Small-town citizens eat in unison and all the restaurants seemed too full to accommodate us six in any kind of timely manner. We did find pizza eventually. We did finally drop off the lively backseaters at an Episcopal church. She extended generosity by buying me a pair of pants after I explained to her how my only pair were ripped in Sunday's crash and how I didn't have but one skirt, really, that I could wear to work. She bought a shirt for me too. And a book: C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed.