Hot Cherry Pie   I always stopped there, the Madonna Inn — that pink and copper shrine on the way down the missionary coast, along the thin thread of mother church’s outpost towns — San Francisco, San José, Santa Clara — rosary beads a day’s walk from one to the next, or now an hour by car but still with sacramental purpose. None of that franchise crap for me. I pulled off the freeway, San Luís Obispo, hungry for hot cherry pie and hot black coffee, body and blood for a soul wrung out and wasted. Then that one time I spotted those kids — a boy at the men’s room door, poised to push, his eyes fixed on a girl not quite his age, maybe a bit older, or a little further along in the game, obviously the one in charge, standing there at the women’s, stock still until she aimed her eyes at his and whispered: Go. I dare you. With that they were lost for good behind those doors — or for better or for worse, who the hell knows? I paid up and continued my mission to Santa Bárbara — to you.                                                          for Ellen     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont March 2013