ann and i were on an extended road trip. we were going generally south, cool & sunny, coming back from wherever we had been. we stopped at a rest area and they had a soda machine, pepsi colored but more white and red. it didnt work right away so i thumped it. ann said Thats not going to work, its not even that kind of machine, its the old kind! but it worked: a soda came thumping down as well as a handful of change, mostly dimes. I smiled smugly, and thumped it again. More change came out! It was chock full of change. Every time I thumped it I got more and more, and more quarters too. Even after we left, Ann driving & me in the passenger seat, I could still keep thumping it and filling my pocket with change. I said, Hey well be able to go to an Ultra Waffle House now!!! Cut to a scene in the same trip but Im temporarily separated from Ann. I have the tracker or a smaller version of it. The car is more bodily connected to me than cars really are. I am making my way back to wherever she is so we can continue the trip. But there is someone with me--a black woman in a wheelchair. She is blind but remarkably deft and sharp. She has long wavy hair and a mischeivous smile. She keeps up with me all the time. Until this one broad intersection in Chicago, where I have to make a sharp right but she gets cut off and remains on the sidewalk. I drive slowly, trying to decide what to do. The thought of knowing, later, that I lost her on a busy street in Chicago, proves unacceptable to my imagination. So I pull over on a sandy shoulder, in an illegal parking space right before a bunch of legal but occupied parking spaces. Traffic swerves dramatically around me when I stop, and I wonder what the hell they are thinking because they would have had to have gotten out of the way of all those other cars anyway! Then this guy kind of like a boy scout cop pulls up and starts chastising me for parking there. I am wearing socks but no shoes. He lectures me, and finally I say, Yeah yeah, and get back in the car and start pushing with my hands, wheelchair style, to get back up the sandy shoulder toward where I lost my companion. I see her. She is coming along toward me, her smile still big. I sing out, Yoo hoo! Mama! Here I am! and so on, so she can orient on my voice. She catches up with me, and we go back down to where the cop guy is. I say to her, Lets get him! and we circle around him in our wheelchairs and harrass him as he tries to go down the path. It is fun.