After a slow rise, and a dramatic flourish of the arm, Mr. Renta all but exploded….
“Welcome to The Riverside! Go upstairs and pick any room you like!”
“Abner! Good to see you! It’s Roscoe Cowerd. Remember me??”
“Of course I do. Is the rest of your family with you? Have you brought your dogs? I don’t want the dogs down here.”
“No Abner, no dogs; just our friends from Kansas City and their kids.”
“Wonderful! How nice. Nice to meet you. Will you be having dinner with us tonight?”
“We wouldn’t miss it” interjected Roscoe, before I had the chance to say “Hell No!”
“What’s for dinner tonight, Abner? We’re all starved!”
“We’ve got Ham & Veg…a…ta…ble soup, Pork Chops, Trout and Strip Steak…all served with Spanish Rice.”
“That sounds great Abner. Sounds like what was on the menu the last 30 times we were here.”
“Well, yeah, I guess that’s true; we got it down pretty good. Dinner is at 6:00 O’Clock. Don’t be late! And make sure you put the bath mat on the back of the chair after you shower!”
And so went my brief introduction to Abner Renta. Not in a billion, trillion, ka-zillion years at that time would I have ever imagined that 14-years later, two days after our final Christmas feast in the family homestead that we built and in which we raised our children, my wife and I would have just driven 700 miles across an icy I-70, over a snowy Berthoud Pass, having pulled a U-Haul trailer loaded with lots of our precious stuff, to ultimately be standing in this very room giving this grimy little man a check comprised of the better part of our lives savings, in return for the honor of sitting in this lobby, greeting strangers and telling them where they would be sleeping, what they would be eating for dinner and at what time they would be eating it.
Who amongst us can at any time imagine and say what will ultimately be?
Not one of us; if we could, we would be King eternally.
Yet we can all accurately make pronouncements as to what absolutely will not be.
It’s funny how the unknown can so soundly trump the absolute.
To be continued....
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