#AtoZ — Oxnard

Join me during the month of April as I blog through the alphabet. My theme will be What’s In A Name. I will attempt to write up a short fictional character sketch beginning with a different letter of the alphabet each day. Remember that a place can also be a character.

Oxnard

It’s supposed to be a nice place. I’m sure that some parts of it are. But, (there’s always a “but” isn’t there?) I haven’t seen it. I’ll tell you about the time my daughters and I went shopping at the outlets near there and on the way back home my youngest daughter got sick. She was too sick to go on for the three hour drive home. I won’t tell you what kind of sick but needless to say, it was messy. We decided the only thing to do was to find a motel and stay for the night. So we got off of the 101 and looked for a motel. The place was really run down. I didn’t even want to be there but I couldn’t figure out how to get back to the freeway. We ended up in a Motel 6. You can’t go wrong with Motel 6. Or can you? Well, it wasn’t the best but we needed to stop and we didn’t want to end up in a worse neighborhood because as we drove on, every block was worse than the previous one. The streets were empty but it was not an empty place. You could feel the eyes looking at your nice, late model car with three females in it and the personalized plate and knowing that your gas tank was nearing empty, you knew you had to get indoors, some place, fast. So we did.

I got the girls taken care of and settled. We even put in a DVD that we had bought at the outlets and they were getting comfortable when the little one got sick again. She had a fever, I could tell although we had no thermometer with us. I called the motel office and asked about where I could get her some medicine and all they could say was that there was a Walgreens a few miles away so off I went, making sure that the girls locked the door and put the chain on right behind me. Every minute I was gone I wondered if they were safe but what were the options but to go out and get medicine, a thermometer, and any food we could use later because it wasn’t even dark yet and we would be there all night.

There was an eerie feeling to the streets and it unnerved me. Empty streets. Broken down cars. Graffiti. Luckily, the Walgreens was next to a gas station and a grocery store so I was able to take care of everything we needed and get back to that motel to my daughters. Then the noise came on with the lights. Cars revving their engines and loud rap music blasting from those same cars. Up and down the street, late into the night.

I was happy when the sun came up and my daughter’s temperature was down. We loaded up the car and headed for the freeway without wasting one moment. We were starving but we would stop for breakfast as soon as the memory of Oxnard was long behind us.