It is one of those days. Better said, yesterday was one, and today another one. They are predicting one tomorrow as well!

The Doctor’s appointment did not go according to the routine. We normally arrive at his office over on South Carlin Springs about a half hour before the scheduled time and have the office ritual complete by the time the actual scheduled event is supposed to start. We got the old dressing removed and the normal procedure started. My foot is a fair distance away from my head, as is yours, and the results of the exam were not what we expected. Things had been going well, the healing process continuing to bind to renewed bright flesh..

That was not the case yesterday. The Physician indicated that in his mind, the logical medical response would be to shut things down at the office and head directly over to the hospital to sever a second or third toe on the starboard foot. That was not at all what I was expecting, and in fact the reverse of how things had been proceeding. There had been an expectation from this same physician that the healing was progressing well and I might be discharged this week or next.

That is not happening, according to the examination. Instead, we will have some additional surgery and one or two fewer toes than the ones we started with yesterday. You can imagine our reaction to losing more digits!

Which brings us to the Tumble Inn. Not directly, of course. But close enough. We have one of the Salts who abandoned one state recently and moved to another. Both are rectangles, though approaching “squares” in their well-defined dimensions. The image? We might have seen it in person before, though less adorned with rust and corrosion. That would have been in 1961 on the big family road trip to the Left Coast. It was conducted via the Rambler Ambassador Cross Country Station Wagon. We kids were comfortable, though there was an awful lot of undeveloped but territory between suburban Detroit and the Pacific Ocean.

But as to the sign- it was in good shape the first time we saw it in person. It is located on the Powder River out on the High Plains. The Inn has gone out of business since that first glimpse, but there are plans to save the sign according to the article in the Cowboy State Daily.

We are not sure when we saw it again, since there were several trips west that followed along the major roadways from the East, hurtling toward Park City in placid Utah where we had a modest ski camp in the 1970s. The last trips across America were the strange ones. There were two cars to be relocated to the shores of different oceans, and that involved driving from Arlington County, VA, to lovely Coronado in metro San Diego.

Granted it was not as spectacular as the explosion last night here. We were lounging in the pleasant transition moments from day to night. The explosion itself was startling in duration and intensity. We made a note to look in the paper this morning to see what had happened to some of us. It was more dynamic than just the long rolling crackling surge of sound.

What appeared with dawn was another startling moment. We will try to compress it to manageable size, this being a days for surgical additional surgical intervention and probably a day or two’s respite from The Daily.

That will involve some of the usual- and by now familiar- drudgeries over at the hospital. The explosion was a magnitude in difference. Below is the image that the Associated Press captured just after the explosion. It was not a Washington Post Story that dominated coverage this morning. The Arlington Police had a press conference last night as firefighters were still trying to quench the flames. According to their reporting, officers were executing a search warrant at the residence in response to alarms that a person had discharged an impressive number of rounds from a flare pistol.

The explosion took place after 8 p.m. in the 800 block of N. Burlington Street, right near the gates to Joint Base Henderson Hall-Arlington. On a pleasant Spring morning it is not an overly ambitious walk from Big Pink at just under two miles fr9m where the Panzer sleeps each day.

That brings things into perspective on our larger Justice issues, tumbling into the parts of it that still work here. We are going to go with the traditional approach and consider whoever was doing the shooting to be “innocent until proven guilty.” That could be true of so much these days, you know? But lying in bed, looking up, the explosion took a disturbing length of time. We don’t completely understand the sequencing of the reporting, not that we claim to understand a great deal about current events these days.

If the police were serving a search warrant, it would seem that something had already occurred to make note of anti-social behavior. There were no reports of personal injury, for which we are thankful. But the matter as a whole is one on which we have questions. Why a flare gun? Why initiate the discharge of warning flares against the police who are supposed to be protecting us?

We follow how these things are handled by the media complex. We suspect this one will drop out of sight quickly since it does not resonate on the popular memes in play. Look at the homes destroyed in the picture. They are very Arlington. Not particularly fancy, but neat and previously well kept. The structures may be concealing a decimal point in their price, a relatively new tradition in Arlington. We remember when this town was down at the heels twenty years ago and still expensive.

So, this was one of those bright mornings in America. The sound of explosions has diminished, and is not displaying the energy of the IDF in Gaza. The signs of change pop up regularly on the roadsides, informing us that Tumble Inn sizzlin’ steaks are only a few hundred miles ahead, and we bet the burgers are top flight as well. It seems to us we have been driving this stretch of smooth roadway for a long time. There was some animated discussion about that. Did the whining from the middle seat in the station wagon have anything to do with Dad making the big. car swerve in a stately manner off the highway? Into the gravel lot in front of the unassuming one-story brown restaurant.

Did we actually stop? It seems to tattered memory that we did in the bright afternoon long ago, and the chocolate shakes were smooth and rich, the fries crispy and sweet with a light coating of catsup. Now, as to why a presumed homeowner would open fire on their own police may reflect something else, some other modern social trend.

In that possibility, we recommend another all-purpose response: “Tumble Inn: 200 Miles to frosty shakes and seasonal fireworks!”

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com