Four hundred miles under the tires again, the usual 4th Tuesday trip back the old stomping grounds.
As the wheels whined into the night, the waning moon lit the brittle fields with a cold glow. The dashboard thermometer dropped as the highway climbed into the mountain pass.
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The old lady wheeling down the hall that afternoon had a good answer to a dull question.
“How’s life treating you?”
“Well, my life has been…a bit of this and a bit of that.”
She talked about the war, about Kyoto, hearing the bombs all the time in the neighboring cities.
She didn’t see the atom bomb.
“Tojo was crazy. He thought we could win. But you couldn’t say anything.”
There wasn’t any food after the war.
“What a mess.”
“That seems a good word for it. Your father was a soldier, right? Did he die?”
“Oh yes. And the government always said they’d pay us, but they never did. And no food. Tojo was crazy.”
Some more folks showed up to hear the talk about Elon Musk and Mars plans. I waved them over.
“Come on in, we’re talking about war, and what to do about it.”
Later that night, a hundred and fifty miles to the south, the clouds veiled the moon. The mountains marched on the right, southbound like me, iron gray. The railroad track on the left ran up to meet the yellow and red block signals, keeping watch in the cold.
I looked out the window at the world rumbling by.
The question remained, real and recent as a Japanese lady not that old in a wheelchair, pulling herself down the hall.
Well?