Word: said
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...loose gravel and hot asphalt of the road shoulder, trying to get a car to give us a push start. She had no shoes, so she stood with one foot on top of the other, danced lightly on her toes, or sat on the car. She said that it looked like there were a lot of freaks on the road-someone ought to stop pretty soon. I said that was what I had thought, but that all the time I had been in New Mexico. I had had lousy luck on the road. The freaks gave the peace sign...
...bends through one small section of hills before stretching out across the desert. As we drove through those hills, the girl told us to look for a place that sold gas and merchandise and that accepted Shell credit cards. We spotted a likely place-it had a sign that said "We accept credit cards" -but as it turned out, you couldn't charge the souvenirs. We stopped and got gas and browsed around this stupid curio shop for some time, looking at the standard souvenirs and the over-priced Indian jewelry. Abruptly, the girl decided we should leave...
...things that struck me first about the girl and continued to strike me was the lack of sophistication of the things she said and the simultaneous intensity of her conviction. It was obvious, even before she told me, that she had not had much education. The things she said I might have heard before, but not with the same "naive" intensity. The feeling with which she spoke each word overwhelmed my college-conditioned tendency to dismiss without a second thought any ideas expressed poorly or in cliches. I knew nothing about her, but I could tell that whoever and whatever...
...said, "it doesn't matter." She asked me what I thought about death. I dodged the question. I could have given her the drop-going-back-to-the-ocean line, but I mostly wanted her to talk about it. Besides, all that trippy theorizing and intellectual speculation about death is, after all, pretty shallow compared with the feeling you get at the most unlikely moments that you, too, are going home to that big ocean one of these days. With that intense witch of a girl, surrounded by that awesome desert and those miles and miles of highway, and those...
...given up on. With anyone else I would have laughed. "It's just an illusion that your mommy and daddy put into your head. Your mind, your brain, your, uh, ego dies, but your body-oh-it can live forever. If you're beautiful. And you are, baby," she said, looking up into my eyes with the eyes of someone who is moved by something beyond herself. "You are. Big and beautiful...