Theodore Francis Green, Gift of God
A Travelogue
PVD, August, 21, 2008
4:40 pm. Too annoyed to read, I’ll vent my travel angst by scribbling these notes. I had just stumbled off a tiny plane after surviving two flights on that puddle-jumper and a connection at Kennedy Airport. Forgetting I wasn’t still in the friendly Midwest, I stumbled toward the airport shuttle counter to ask if the five o’clock were the last one. But the haughty Northeastern indigines were just too busy to bother with a tourist wanting them — most unjustly — to execute their secretarial duties. The pear-shaped, middle aged woman bowled her eyes down an alley of condescension, and turned to her teenage companion, saying, “Why don’t you handle this one?” to which he said, dredging strength from the bowels of his indolence, “The shuttle comes every hour on the hour from five to eleven.” He had the air of someone working at the World Trade Center Site — instead of the TF Green & Providence airport shuttle — who thought the van’s movements were not only obvious, but were also an object of public importance. Hadn’t I been watching the news in the last seven years? Telling me the time of the shuttle was just too, too dull-making.
4:45 pm. A woman sighs with relief as she pulls her caravan of baggage and children to a halt, exclaiming “Starbucks!” as though she’d found the water beyond the desert’s mirage. The coffee shop, which undoubtedly had a presence wherever she’d come from, she treated with the reverence of a long-traveling monk, blessed by Grace to have found at last the font that will save her from dying of thirst along the stretch of wasteland which remains between her martyr-making vacation and home.
5:02pm. The shuttle arrived promptly, more or less, and I was happy that only one other passenger accompanied me. Before I’d finished jotting down the previous incidents, our driver began chatting with the other shuttle patron. We’ll call him Theodore. He told us he was in town for a couple of days for the annual conference of the Northern Masonic Jurisdicton of the Scottish Rite, which comprises the states from Delaware to Maine and surrounding the Great Lakes. Thoedore also said that these boundaries were created after the Civil War, and that a separate authority holds sway over the South and West. Maybe my work on The 39 Clues has made me paranoid, but he spoke as though he expected us to find him fishy, and was busily crafting the persona of a businessman in town for a perfectly ordinary company meeting. Yet there was something measured in his tone and choice of words. His only remark about the substance of the trip was, “We’re not like those thirty-third degree guys; they’re crazy.” He did tell us, also, that 3,000 members of his order will be Providence this weekend. Anyway, we chatted pleasantly about things to do in Providence, until he confessed had meetings to go to all weekend, and so wouldn’t be getting out of the hotel much. Dashing my dreams, Theodore did not offer to induct me into the order before stepping out of the van, nor did he spit out a Dan Brown-esque, last-ditch tell-all before being reabsorbed into the waiting arms of his compatriots. He seemed like such an upstanding, normal Chicagoan, that I wondered how a whole political party could have been created (and flourished) with only the goal of stamping the Masons out.
