Meditations on a Hitchhiking Ticket

At the time, I was walking backward through the bus stop beside a high school, hitchhiking. Already I was ten minutes late to a T. S. Eliot seminar: that was because I overslept; that was because I got to bed late; that was because the hitchhiking trip back to Denver from D.C. had run 46 instead of the customary 35 to 40 hours—most of the way at twenty degrees, and with few rides over two hundred miles.

A car stopped and silently beckoned. But this was no ride. No door opened.