mother and i are in a car with other old women from the church on our way to a fellowship meeting in the desert on the east side of town , and that splat of water from the canteen carefully divides time as precisely as the ticking of any venerable old grandfather clock in the carpeted hall of an inn at midnight , which is where a hundred authors before me have sat in a lonely room and their table might even have been rickety and the guest next door snoring loudly , and the pit-pat of the water that day sounds more significant to me , as my pit-pat steps go down the marble staircase in the library and echo with those of the spry old man who leads the way .