Our kitchen window faces east, and Grant usually stayed in the kitchen nights, standing by the window watching the highway and passing time by eating various strange concoctions that would be enough to gag a normal person. Whenever he saw a car that looked like a prospect, he hurried outside and went into his act. I usually began the nightly watch at the kitchen window, being "on duty" from about nine to ten while Grant relaxed and read the paper, or took a little rest in preparation for his long vigil. Standing at the kitchen window looking at the blackness, broken only by the lights of the service stations, the beacon of the airport, and two motel signs, grew tiresome; and I didn't care to copy Grant's method of entertaining himself by indulging in gustatory nightmares and inviting actual ones. For the first night or two, I contented myself with studying the Peacock's beautiful neon sign--a huge stately blue and red, haughty peacock. That began to pall, though, and my legs got tired. I felt sorry for Grant, who put in hours of this each night after I was in bed. I also felt sorry for myself. Sitting in a chair, while it would have been far more comfortable than standing, was impossible because of the height of the window. When I sat down, no matter at what distance from the window or at what angle to it, all I could see was a sparkling array of stars. We had no books large enough to build the seat of a chair appreciably higher; and to sit on our thick medical book and a stack of smaller ones would be to ask for a couple of broken ribs. The typewriter seemed to be the perfect solution. It's a portable, and, enclosed in its case, makes a solid seat. I put it on the chair in the kitchen, sat on top of it, and found that I could see the highway. Whenever I saw headlights of a car coming slowly I told Grant, and he put down his paper to go out after it. During the average early evening--the part that was my shift--there weren't, usually, more than two or three coming slowly enough to rate any attention, so Grant's reading or resting wasn't much disturbed. Of the two or three, he usually managed to get one, so I couldn't use the excuse that it didn't pay, to resign from my boring job. Even though I was more comfortable, now that I could sit down, I was still bored. I decided to try to read. The impracticality of such frivolity became apparent at once. If I let the book rest on my lap, I had to look downward at it in order to read it. And if I looked downward, I couldn't see the flash of headlights on the highway. The only way I could keep watch on the highway as I read was to hold the book up in front of me, so high that the light of headlights would be visible beneath it, or, for variety, a little lower, so that the headlights would appear above it.