Ottumwa diversion

	Escape, geographically or internally, is my necessary default. Whether through an open driver's-side window or the sanctuary of moments stashed behind the eyes, time is innately set aside to get lost somewhere & possibly stumble onto something moving along in comfortable limbo.

Figment of Imagination by Dan Halstead, 1963

	I chanced upon this piece hanging in a secondhand mall booth. I took it down & rotated with quarter turns in either direction to try & take it all in . . .  

. . . & with each spin, another image would capture me . . . 

. . . in pieces, as if my own series of dreams or flashbacks amounting to any lifespan of just ballpoint pen & paper . . . 

. . . titled to give the collage my own interchangeable, cryptic frame.

It even came with a newspaper article about the artist, a dry cleaner from Ottumwa IA. 

The town name seemed familiar, but I couldn’t place why. 

The article also specifically mentioned that particular drawing, Figment of Imagination, which, it read, was normally on display where the artist worked as a manager, at Sunkist Cleaners.

$25 later, I was driving towards Ottumwa with my find.

	I stuck mostly to county roads, zig-zagging until I pulled over for an estate sale sign at a small house surrounded by farmland. 

An older man came out of the house while I walked past temporary tables made of sawhorses & plywood covered in obsolete keepsakes. He stared into the open distance & said "The Martins have gone." 

I looked in the direction he was looking. Before the expanse of blue & fields beyond, a series of gourds hung from poles across a manicured lawn that yellowed & then disappeared to acres of brown. 

He said, "They always come back, but this year we didn't even see them leave."
 
There was no movement anywhere. Nothing on the road or in the fields — no clouds. The man was looking off, still within a memory, when I pulled back onto the two-lane.

	Closing in on Ottumwa, I suddenly remembered why the town name rang a bell: a movie I’d seen years before, King of Kong — a documentary about an eighties Donkey Kong championship hosted in Ottumwa.

In high school, Donkey Kong was my game. Years will spin their own collage. At the time of the newspaper story, Halstead was about the age then that I am now. 

I cruised the town’s main street & around a few blocks, looking for nothing — or anything, really. Of course, there was no Sunkist Cleaners anymore. No arcade. 

	I drove a little further, then settled for a motel to wander from & entertain myself with my usual pastime: eavesdropping & conjuring. Like Halstead explained, “This is more or less the way I relax . . . you get all buggy, you know?”