Friday - 7am

We stopped at the Denny’s in Patterson (along I-5 S, parallel to San Jose) for a food and bathroom break. And being only a little more than halfway along, it was a relief to be off the road for awhile. My brother got a table and my sister-in-law and I made a B line for the bathrooms.

I stopped frozen. The stink hit me like a wall. What in the HELL could produce a smell THAT BAD? I theorized it was a potent combination of smells, as I couldn’t place it as just one thing. It was the worst smelling bathroom EVAR. During breakfast, we spent part of our time watching the faces of the women who came out of that bathroom. Most looked positively stricken.

And then there was a man and a women sitting at a table perpendicular to our booth who literally said NOTHING to each other the entire time they were there. The man was so morbidly obese that while he sat, he had to turn each leg almost 90 degrees outwards so that his stomach could hang between his legs down to his calves (whoa!). The man didn’t even look at her. The woman looked positively, completely miserable. Now she might not have been unhappy at all, but it certainly looked that way. And I got to thinking how a person could continue existing if they were despondently unhappy. How could they continue to be with someone who neglected them so?