Meridian Public Library Internet Card

The best part of travel is knowing, one way or the other, that you can secure, somehow, someway, a bit of internet time along the way. Good hotels, internet cafes, and libraries continue to save the day for me and make my travels light and interesting with ready internet access. I rely on them as much as the countless others that come into my library each day looking for an hour of free connection time.

Meridan Public Library doesn't have free connect time for out-of-system users like Kitsap Regional Library does, but they offer out of town guests a chance to purchase a card that's good for so many hours at a time. I forget what the amount of time I had coming, but it only cost me a dollar and a quarter for the card, which was reusable and reloadable. I haven't had to use it for a while now, but that's only because your mail box is down and I'm not writing anyone in such a secure fashion as I was you back in those days.

I would come off the road just aching to write to you. There was a time that not a day would go by that you didn't have a word or so waiting for you from me in your email box. I still remember you coming back from a weekend outting, Leavenworth I think it was, and not finding anything there from me. Gosh, the disappointment! So that was always one of my mandates: write. We had a deal going there for the longest time: you made the time happen and I made the words happen and together it was pure magic. But that Meridian card helped things along. I always came in from that Boise run with a pile of hastily scribbled notes by my side, words cadged at seventy miles an hour, visions and images and thoughts jotted down as I fairly flew through The Blues or the wee towns and cities by the side of the highway. Meridian was always the place I would take the kids my first day in town. They would hit the children's department and I would get an hour's worth of time to "talk" to you, find words, lay down visions and images and mad dreams from the road, all the while missing you like crazy.

Yesterday I found one of those cards stuck in the caddy above the key rack by the back door. I couldn't remember the last time I used it. It had to be sometime back in the spring of '06. I know that I was writing pen pals and such last year on my travels back and forth to California, but I never had a reason to go to Meridian. The security shield in my life had been lifted by then. It was good to have one back then with you. In those heady emails we spoke volumes of love and heresy and joy. The world couldn't understand it then, and they wouldn't be able to understand it today either, really, if I put it to them to try to understand it the way that we now have to live with it.

Meridan. All those words were worth the buck or two I laid down for that card. Your words were cool water for me at road's end. My words...well, they were our spiritual connection. Our life blood. Our long distance powwow of mad visions. Mad visions. We never can have enough of those.

Thank you, Meridian Public Library.

Your WHMB