Humidity. It's sitting sucking up life like a plastic bag over the collective Kansas head and I'm in it. I'm of it. I watch people waddle through it from the Applebee's windows and bring it in little sweat droplets as they order a steak and wipe themselves with bev napkin. It sags their Mickey Mouse t-shirts and the frayed jeans of their buck-toothed children.

Children who are three or four and drink soda out of large glasses like thirsty elephants and you can see the black sugar rot begin to crust around their mouths and bubble into flab like their parents before them, the parents who spit giggling demands from their mountain fort of Applebee's garlic fries, struggling to squeeze themselves from the booth in order to find the bathroom where they are surrounded by pictures of Jennifer Aniston in a smell of chemical lavender and they can excrete the same steamy chunks they shove down their throats.

And the grandparents at 4:45 pm have a weekly light shuffling among Oriental salad leaves which they will leave in mounds but they eat me with their old, sad eyes because I watch and pay attention to them, even if only for the shaky movement to pry open their coinpurses from the Depression.

Earlier this week my dad woke me up to go to a bar with some of his former co-workers who hadn't seen me since I was very little. On the way over we talked about who would be missing from this reunion--namely Maxi, my dad's best friend who died from lung cancer 10 years ago. Maxi was a Southern man with a beard and a heavily dimpled chin who wore thick glasses. He was tall and thin in short-sleeved button up shirts with a breast pocket for his cigarettes and a gut hung over his cut-off jeans. 

Maxi loved birds. He traveled all over the world on every dime he earned just to look at birds, and then he would return to our dinner table to talk about them. We knew some of his stories were lies, but they were Southern lies that had a pure, carefree core and dripped with the truth of life's happy details.

Maxi sailed to Antarctica to watch the penguins. While he was snapping photos and trying to keep out the cold, he noticed one of the birds didn't huddle with the rest of the penguins. Little by little Maxi approached the "fella," and they made friends. "Peter the Penguin" followed him across the lonely, Arctic cliffs by day and camped outside of his tent at night. "Once," said Maxi, "I made myself a cup of coffee in the morning and Peter and I walked to the edge of an iceberg. I gave a big yawn and a stretch, and I looked down and  Peter was extending his flippers like this," He got up and stretched his forearms like flippers, "Mimicking." After many days of one-sided conversations and lost but precious photographs, Maxi and Peter parted. "The ocean-liner was floating away and I could see him on the edge of that same iceberg, away from all the other penguins, just watchin' me go."

My dad would walk our dog, Heinrich, at 1 am to the house where Maxi was staying with Joleen. Up the driveway to the back porch he would tie Heinrich to a fencepost and join Maxi in his cloud of smoke to relax on the plastic lawn furniture, talking baseball and B. B. King and literature in the warm wet air. "Bubba," Maxi called my father, "Bubba, you have no idea about the beauty of the South until you've been there on a summer evening. Listen, there's a quote, let me remember it now..." They'd sit in silence for a while, listening to the crickets while Maxi inhaled his cigarette. "Here, listen. I'm paraphrasing. 'There are stars, pricking out as you watch them among the others already coldly and softly burning; the end of day is one vast, green and soundless murmur... something like that." My dad asks, is that Faulkner? "That's Faulkner, Bubba." And then he would go on, digging everything in that low drawl; his hometown Sparta, Tennessee, then birds of the rainforest, and the Civil Rights Movement.

I sat on the filing cabinets and Maxi would stroll in, shoving cigarettes into his pocket. "Right on, sister!" he'd shout and make a 'power to the people' fist which I had been taught to return with  "Right on, brother!" Once when my dad and Maxi were at the Ramada Inn, a secretary came up to Maxi and said, "Sir, there's a call for you from Mrs. Coretta King." No doubt there was a woman on the phone and Maxi bellowed "Hey Coretta!", but whether it really was the wife of Martin Luther King we'll never know.

A couple weeks before he passed away, I sat on his lap and cried when he told me he didn't believe in God. When he did die, to be cremated and scattered at the bird observatory in Western Kansas, he left me a torquoise ring which I wore to the funeral home around a chain. At the viewing in a room with fake wood paneling and pink walls, he wore a nice gray suit and a bag around his shoulder. When I asked Joleen what the bag was for, she whispered, "That's his travel bag. He's not with you and me, but he's not dead, either. He's just on the road."

On the road. Right on.