Did the white-coated people in the lab know what they were looking at? Would they go to lunch and not know that whatever they found under the microscope would change lives forever? He wanted to yell at the entire hospital, That’s my wife, that’s my entire life, our entire future you’re looking at. Here was a man who could not stand to have anyone else drive, hated to fly because he was not comfortable unless he was at the controls, and now he was helpless. Totally dependent on the hospital staff, who looked to him to be no more than teenagers. What had happened to the older, gray-haired nurses and doctors he had remembered the last time she was in the hospital, having their daughter, thirty-one years ago, and what the hell are they so happy about? Didn’t they know how serious life and death was, for God’s sake? That poor sweetheart could wake up with her breast gone and be told that it had spread everywhere and that she was dying. Why in the hell hadn’t they found a cure for this thing yet?
What are we doing sending money all over the world, spending billions on the military budget and on making stupid movies and television shows? People are dying every day and we’re just throwing money away. Why aren’t they giving it to the scientists to find a cure? Something is wrong—cancer has been around too long; somebody must have a cure, they’re just not letting anybody know. He had worked himself into a murderous rage when the doctor came down the hall.
“Mr. Warren, we just got the report from the lab and it’s absolutely benign, so we’re gonna close her on up. She should be out of recovery in a few hours.” He spoke over his shoulder to another doctor that had just passed him in the hall. “Hey, Duke, can you get me two more tickets for the game tomorrow?”
Macky didn’t hear Duke’s response. He stood up and took a walk outside the hospital. Everything inside had been cold and sterile and now he was back out in the warm sunshine and he felt as if he could breathe again. He found himself smiling at the people he passed and at that moment he made a deal with himself. Anything that woman wants from now on, she gets.
Afterward, he had to remind himself of that deal he made that day outside the hospital. When he asked her the next year where she wanted to go for a vacation, she said, “Well, there is one place that I have been dying to go to, but I don’t know if you will want to.”
“Norma, I told you we will go anywhere you want.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Las Vegas and see Wayne Newton in concert.”
He would have gone to the moon had she wanted.
Revitalize Downtown Elmwood Springs
SIX MONTHS after they returned from Las Vegas, Norma finally found the civic cause she had been searching for. Somehow it seemed that after Neighbor Dorothy died, nobody ever came to town anymore. When she had her radio show, people came from miles around by the busloads, but now, with the new interstate, downtown was dying on the vine. At the next chamber of commerce meeting a brand-new committee to come up with solutions to revitalize downtown Elmwood Springs was formed and Norma was voted to head it. After walking downtown, clipboard in hand on a fact-finding tour, Norma reported her conclusion at the next meeting.
“We are too dull—what we need is a theme.”
“A theme? What kind of a theme?” asked Leona.
“A theme, something to make us different, make us stand out, set us apart from other towns so people will want to come here. We just don’t have any character; every building is just willy-nilly. We need to make an impression. When you drive in, what do you see? You see a sign that says Welcome to Elmwood Springs but we need more than that. We need to have one that offers an idea, a claim, something unique. Home of the World’s Largest Sweet Potato or something. We need to give people something unusual, an attraction that will make them want to get off the interstate and stop.”
They all fired at once:
“Can’t we think of something like that to get us in the Guinness Book of World Records?”
“Like the world’s largest cake. Or pie or pancake, even.”
“What about a waffle, the world’s biggest waffle?”
“But once you make it, it won’t last—you have to offer them something to see that’s still here.”
“We need something that’s indigenous.”
“How about home of the largest squash ever grown? Don’t you remember when Doc Smith grew that squash and sent it to the state fair?”
“How do you know it was the world’s largest squash? It was the state’s, but we don’t know for sure if it was the world’s.”
“All right, we can say the state’s largest squash—who’s going to know anyway? Or care?”
“I think they took a picture of it. We could find out, we could display that.”
“Well, I tell you what. I certainly wouldn’t turn off the interstate to look at a squash, much less a picture of a squash,” said Tot.
“What do we have a lot of?”
“Corn?”
“No, Iowa has corn. Idaho has the potato.”
“Rhubarb? Does anyone else have rhubarb?” asked Verbena, biting into a doughnut. “We could get a whole bunch and plant it real quick.”
“Why does it have to be a vegetable—why can’t it be a meat or a pastry or a beverage?”
Norma said, “I still think a theme would be better and permanent, like having Main Street look different somehow. Maybe have it look like a street in a different country, you know, like that Danish town in California.”
“What about this: We could have a town theme. All we would have to do is change everything into Swiss chalets and put bells on the cows and things. Call ourselves ‘Little Switzerland’ or something.”
“What cows? We don’t have any cows in town.”
“All right, you come up with something.”
“What about Hawaiian, I love that, everybody could wear muumuus and Dixie teaches the hula—maybe she could teach the whole town and we could give everybody a lei when they drove into town. Something like that.”
The next morning Norma drove around town trying to envision a theme that would, as the committee eventually had suggested, “more easily lend itself to fit the existing topography.” There was not a body of water to speak of, unless you included the lake or the springs, so the Hawaiian idea was out. Nor was there a mountain within three hundred miles. Elmwood Springs was as flat as the world’s largest pancake and inland.
Inland. She had a brainstorm. Why not capitalize on just that, Elmwood Springs right smack in the middle of the country. After all, they were not too far north, not too far south, east or west. And if you dropped New Mexico and Nevada, which you could because they were mostly desert, then Elmwood Springs was truly sitting right smack-dab in the middle of the country. Everybody said that if you climbed high enough you could see into Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and all the way down to Iowa.
And so it was voted on. George Crawford painted the sign and on May 22 the committee held the sign unveiling and applauded. There it was for all the world that passed by on the interstate:
NEXT EXIT ELMWOOD SPRINGS, MISSOURI, [BR /]VOTED THE MOST MIDDLE TOWN IN AMERICA
Not a single car turned off the road because of it, but the town felt better.
The Gospel World
ONE AFTERNOON Mrs. Pike of Spartanburg, South Carolina, received a surprise visit from her old friend Minnie Oatman, who was passing through on her way to join the group for a sacred-music festival in Dadeville. Minnie was in the living room, holding forth about the state of her health and the state of the gospel music world. “You know, I was laid up for four months a while back.”