When, after the period of escrow had passed, the Peacock was taken over by its new owners, Mr. and Mrs. Needham, it was fun to stand by the kitchen window as dusk crept through the Pass and watch them struggle with their neon sign switches. It was a gaudy sight. First the green "vacancy" sign would flash on and off; then, gaining certainty, it would go on and stay on. Then the lamps at the highway end of the white walls surrounding the motel would light up brilliantly. Then the "vacancy" sign would go off. Then the peacock would burst into glorious color, only to leap back into darkness again. Next, the bright red words "Peacock Motel" would flare out of the blackness like a splash of red paint, followed by the green "vacancy." Then, one after another, all the signs would be turned off, as the new owners sought, by the trial and error method, the switch that turned on the little light outside the office. And by the time they located that switch, they turned the office light off again hunting for the switch that turned on the big white "vacancy" sign on their lawn, between the rows of units, or for the one which turned the ordinary-looking, roof-sheltered little well between the office and the highway into a blazing, neon-outlined wishing well that could have dropped out of a fairy story. I knew exactly what the new owners of the Peacock were going through. I remembered how hard it had been for us--or for me, rather--to know which switch would turn on which light or sign. And the Peacock, obviously, had a lot more switches than we did. But even though I sympathized completely with their bewilderment, I never missed standing at the kitchen window in the early evening when the contagious wave of sign-turning-on began to sweep along the highway through Banning. The aurora borealis had nothing on the Peacock, for a couple of weeks. When we left Los Angeles we brought with us two radios, one of them the small white one Grant had given me before we were married, and which I had, in Los Angeles, kept on the kitchen sink so that music could mingle with the splashings of dish water. We planned to rent it now, at fifty cents a night, to our customers. We put the radio on the desk in the office, but for some reason we didn't get around to putting on it a sign that would apprise our customers of the fact that it was for rent. Naturally, no one asked to rent it, and when we had been there for several months it hadn't earned us a penny. Fixing a sign to put on the radio was one of those things that seem inexplicably to suggest procrastination, like changing the lining paper in bureau drawers, or like writing to your husband's Aunt Minnie and inviting her to come out for a few weeks.