Elegant Defense An PDF

A gray sky overhead, Jason Greenstein sat silently in the passenger seat of a Ford Windstar. It was Friday, March 13, 2015. Jason was heading to a miracle and traveling in the style to which he had become accustomed—filth. His silver minivan, fast approaching Denver from its suburbs, looked like scrap metal on wheels. The heater coughed and spat and seemed to work only when it was hot outside. The back door didn’t open. Various warning lights dotted the dashboard, alerting Jason to system failures he ignored. His maps and atlases overflowed compartments and littered the floor. Then there was the smell.

It permeated the cabin from the five-gallon gasoline jerry can he kept in back for emergencies, and from the accumulated greasy residue from endless fast-food stops. Jason could never resist 7-Eleven rotisserie hot dogs, despite referring to them as “witches’ fingers” and “disgusting.” When Jason went on cross-country sales trips, which was often, he would sometimes sleep in the back of the van. He’d curl up on a stained orange Oriental rug, his head next to the gas can. Or he’d slumber on top of the boxes of shiny, bejeweled trinkets that he sold to far-flung casinos for use as promotional items. Jason was forty-seven, with an undergraduate diploma from an elite college, graduate degrees in business and law, and no reliance on or particular reverence for those trappings. He lived from one entrepreneurial idea to another, one adventure to the next. Never was he happier than when he was driving, a dip of Skoal Fine Cut packed in his lip, rocking out to Springsteen or to a local station on the dial with some new town on the horizon. Jason was determined to discover, explore, and live his way. He was a genuine American dreamer and the van his covered wagon.