The Trip part 1

On June 28th, finally finished with moving out of my place and putting everything in storage except the welter of things I needed to bring with me (complex because of the combination of hotel and camping), I walked to the Enterprise rental car outlet located about a mile away and picked up my chariot that I would have until July 26th. I had managed to snag the car for $500 for the month, thanks Kayak. It also helps a lot to reserve way ahead of time- I think I reserved the car back in April. Anyway, there's nothing quite like the experience of an epic road trip in a rented car. It has its own profligate, wild, irresponsible feeling to it. Not my car, not my monkeys, so to speak. 

 Isabel and I are probably soon to part. I love her and she's been great, but I can't justify putting any more money into her, and she needs brakes and a cooling system fix that might even include a new head gasket, which in itself is a $1200 job. She's okay for around the town, except for not having air conditioning, which, when it's 114 degrees out, is...inconvenient. Anyway, I left her peacefully in the driveway, with a scattering of oleander flowers. 

 Motel Number One was the Shamrock Country Inn in Shamrock, Texas, after a 13 hour drive. Because AZ doesn't do daylight savings, it's also two hours later there. So I arrived at about midnight. 

 The next day, the drive to Nashville, another 12 hours. Nashville is all about food for me, including Bolton's Hot Chicken and Jeni's ice cream, amazing stuff. I spent too much on a Hilton hotel room that was overpriced. It's tricky with these chains, as one supposedly knows what one is getting yet rooms and facilities can be extremely uneven. I have found the industry to be in a sort of pseudo-monopoly situation, where room rates are artificially high across all of the chains, as if they are in collusion, which they probably are. 

 Next stop, weirdly outside of contemporary time Harrisonburg, Virginia—well, weirdly outside of time except for being the home to thousands of refugees from around the world. It's such a strange combo. But when you go to the local soft serve ice cream place, Kline's, you can hear Hmong, Farsi, Arabic, Hindi, Pan-African languages, etc. I have no idea how Harrisonburg became a magnet for so many refugees, but it's wild. I try to launch myself across the country at the front end of the trip, and then get all of the family visits done, and then I am a "free" man, and this trip followed that pattern. 

 My first family stop was Allentown, to see the next oldest brother, his wife, and my 87 and 86 year old father and mother. My father and mother (who celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary last month) live in an apartment that my brother built out in his house. They aren't doing very well, really, with my father very unsteady on his feet, having had his driver's license taken away, and refusing to use his walker. My mother is more mobile physically but has serious agoraphobia and refuses to leave their apartment except to go to medical appointments. Neither one of them accepts any help or is willing to make many changes—my father was diagnosed with Parkinson's but denies that he has it ("these doctors are always misdiagnosing it, I read on the internet") and refuses to make any of the dietary changes that can help. My mother doesn't think there's any solution for her terror of leaving home. My brother and his wife suffer my parents' eccentricities with varying degrees of exasperation, and of course, they have stuff of their own they are dealing with. It was a challenging few days visiting there, as I felt pulled in many directions, and whenever I leave, I feel a certain degree of "survivor guilt" and like I should just drop everything I'm doing and move back there and help my parents die. 

 I was touched that my mother moved this plaster cast of my handprint with her to their apartment, from the house in which they lived since 1967. Looking at it, all of the lines on my palm are identical, of course. 

 A photo of my mother from when she was about 19. 

 The sycamore lined streets of west Allentown. I usually head up to my sister's place in the country in New York, just across the PA line near the Delaware, after the time with parents and brother. My sister and her husband are low maintenance, don't really like to interact that much, and I have the run of an entire, separate apartment that they are now renting as an Airbnb. I can decompress up there, listening to the Ten Mile River sing, communing with the trees. 

 I had done okay on these first days of the trip not ruminating too much on the broken heart, and missing a certain person mostly in reasonable ways. One of the ideas behind this trip, similar to the trip two years ago after A dumped me, was to experience some liberation. I could have stayed in my apartment too, yet I knew in my guts I just had to get out of there. It is a fine little space, but I knew some darker, painful loneliness, disappointment, yearning, isolation and insomnia there, and through no fault of its own, it had accretions of emotional soot and shadow. In a moment of real solitude, not driving, not listening to music either cathartic or anodyne on the car stereo, hiking up along a beautiful brook in the fat green woods, I caught the sight of purple clover and Queen Anne's lace, and because I have the ridiculously associative mind that I do, I was slain by the memory of Dylan's "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go," which I had long connected. It was painful. 
Characteristic of the highs and lows of the trip, as I "processed" (a word that just sounds like I was working in a meat packing plant), moments of a feeling of freedom and lightness alternated with crashing grief. No reason why the trip should be any different from my overall life, really, although the geographical changes do have a deep healing effect on me. The agency of driving, of seeing new things, of traveling do have an outside-in effect, much of the time. Yet, there was also the enduring experience of wanting to tell, share, show, laugh, converse, at different levels of intensity but pretty much all the time. I guess I was and am getting used to it. I think no mater what we do, we scar over, and time the preserver is also time the destroyer. At times, I am feircely angry or sad that this is true. At others, it's a fucking relief. "The swiftness of time is God's mercy," says my old pal, William Blake. 

I laugh at my own associative sentimentality sometimes, for example, looking up at the sky and immediately thinking of the sexually suggestive framing. 

After a few days up there, including avoiding the 4th of July, I headed back down to New Jersey to see my oldest brother's side of the family, including my grand nephew and grand niece. I arranged it so that the last social interaction would be with my brother of choice, a best friend of 37 years, on his working hay farm in western New Jersey. This is the perfect way to end the east coast rounds, and launch westward. 

The morning of my departure, it was foggy and cool. 

I had decided, at some point, to head northwest. I had never been along the northern border of the country, and I wanted deep, wet, dark woods and cool nights, and new places, preferably places with no associations at all. I still vaguely had in the back of my mind that maybe U and I could have a Platonic visit in Minneapolis—I pictured a picnic with her beautiful children, maybe at Minnehaha Falls—and I discovered and re-discovered this draw, this strange impulse, as I continued west. Sometimes it would feel completely reasonable and like it would be a healing and enjoyable thing to do. Other times I couldn't tell. Still other times, the very thought of it destroyed me. Impossible, I would think. Then I would put the idea out of my conscious mind, and yet again discover, maybe 300 miles later, the sneaky pull back to her. 

With that unresolved, I decided to drive north in Pennsylvania and head across Interstate 80, to Ann Arbor, a place I had always wanted to see.