Chapter 21: Hustled

Back on the road... sidewalk... we called Dad who told us he had left Mom under the HUGE banyan tree and that we needed to find her.

She was no longer under the Banyan tree.

We looked around for a while, then called Dad to report failure and remind him that she could be in any one of the surrounding shops- and that it's difficult to find a short high-energy woman bent over a cane in the shops. He sighed and said that she did somehow lose her pain when she was shopping.

So Sarah and I squared our shoulders and continued the hunt on Dad's suggestion that perhaps she had gone into the Old Courthouse which had been converted into a gift shop and art Gallery for local artists. We crossed under the Banyan tree where tourists climbed next to the Do Not Climb sign and a hippie played his uke enthusiastically. Lo and behold as we approached the doors there was Mom, smiling, with a bag in her hand. She lured us, now careful at least, into the gallery and we enjoyed the pictures. She decided she wanted to go downstairs to the second gallery and "would only be a minute." We headed back to the car and sat in the trunk and talked to each other and Dad for a few minutes before we all, unanimously, declared hunger.

The hunt needed to be reinstated, raptor-like, Sarah and I each took one side of the courthouse- Sarah, seaside, I, mountainside, to meet up on the opposite side of the courthouse where the prison gallery was- so as not to miss her if she was coming out.

She was not. She had met one of the artists down there who was a lady from a town right near our school. As Mom continued to talk to her, Sarah and I looked around at the beautiful pictures and were startled by the sailor on a censor in the prison cell who started talking to us about how he had ended up there. A many lifetimes sentence for disorderly conduct seems a little rough to me as well. Eventually we got Mom out of the basement, but then she had to go upstairs and pay for her pickings down there. So we, not having learned our lesson, returned to the car and waited for a time. Right when we were about to make a third foray, she came into view, promising that it had just taken forever to ring her up.