No Ideas but in Receipts

So now’s the time of year when my kitchen card table slash dining room table slash occasional desk takes on yet another role, piled with receipts and envelopes and tax forms for weeks on end. I now have the phone on speaker mode, waiting for an answer to a question about form 4562, as the IRS’ hold music ping-pongs between Waltz of the Flowers and Eine Kleine Nachtmusik for over a half-hour. The receipts range from those that are tiny and abstract—something you’d get from a cash register at an old grocery store—to veritable scrolls containing ads, legal boilerplate, color logos, and the name of your clerk. There are also those pieces of paper that were once receipts, but it seems that they were printed with disappearing ink—perhaps in cahoots with the IRS. What does this have to do with Williams, you ask? As you can see in this June receipt from Pilot Travel Centers, LLC (Store 255, Milford, Connecticut), in addition to purchasing 1 Toast Peanut Butter crackers ($.30) and 1 Snyder Sourdough Nibs pretzels ($1.29), I purchased an alphabet of reflective truck decals to spell out a familiar Paterson aphorism.