How I loved loved loved Appetite for America.  I heard the interview on NPR and immediately downloaded the book on Kindle.  When I was a girl I spent a great amount of time in the backseat of a Buick driving across America three and four times a year.  My parents raced greyhounds and in those years, the racing was seasonal so we were always on the go from track to track hauling our dogs behind us in a homemade trailer. Though we were itinerant, my mother’s home town was a small town in Southeastern Kansas, Parsons, a one time junction for the MKT railroad.   Harvey Houses were well known to us. As were the railroads. Almost all of the highways paralleled the railroad tracks and I counted cars and read the logos out loud urging Dad to beat the train, mother white knuckling and tsking beside him.

When I was ten or eleven, my parents would sometimes let me stay on in Kansas while they drove north to Denver or Portland. After a few days my uncles and aunties would take me to the station, pin a note on my dress and put five dollars in my pocket sending me on my solo way to my folks. I cannot describe the heady feeling of navigating the cars, carefully watched, BTW, by the porters who called me Miss Sutherland.  I ate in the dining car with a single rose on the white tablecloth, usually with a couple or some other traveler, I felt competent and elegant all on my own.  But the best part was when I headed back through the cars, supporting myself on the window side to my sleeper.  I yearned to have the top one. I climbed up the little wooden ladder and the porter pulled the heavy curtain closed behind me. And then, and then there was only the little blue light and me. I could see my reflection in the pane of glass. It lay over the rushing fields and the cross roads, the flashing warning lights on the barriers. Then sometimes I would wake up, the train shuddering under me, steam pumping up from outside and I could see the name of a station on the side of a small depot and even saw people getting off. I wanted it to go on forever.

So reading your book was a trip completely waiting for me. I have been in all those towns. I knew America like crazy. I just came back from a trip to Parsons. Oh Kansas, oh, Missouri, the Rockies. Oh boy, America.

Thanks a whole lot. Dee-lish!  Your love of what you write about shines through. You have a terrific voice.

Claudette Sutherland

www.gotoclaudette.com

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