Waiting Rooms: Essays

Waiting Rooms is a collection of forty-three essays. Each one is set in a single room where people are waiting for something. A DMV in Pennsylvania. An unemployment office in Ohio. A hospital chapel at three in the morning. A bail bonds office across the street from a jail in Miami.Samuel Vale spends most of these essays watching. A woman's folder spills open on a government floor and papers go everywhere. A father stands outside a kindergarten door on his kid's first day and can't make himself walk away yet. A man sits with a bag of frozen peas against his wrist at two in the morning, not saying anything to anyone.The last section of the book is different. These are the rooms Vale wasn't just passing through - an AA meeting parking lot, a funeral home arrangement table, an oncology waiting room where he's the one about to hear his name called.The book doesn't try to make a case for waiting, or find a lesson in it. Some of it was boring. Some of it was frightening. Mostly it's just an account of what people do and notice while they sit there, and what they leave behind when they finally get up.