I haven't see it all, yet. But I haven't been on a road trip in some time. I think this is yet another symptom of being old. And writing this makes me think that... I'm working on Thanksgiving. But my work has a vacation exchange policy where if I work on Thanksgiving, I get to take those days as floating holidays. I can take them whenever I want, instead of just Thanksgiving.
So maybe I'll take those couple days and take them on to another couple days and take off to Georgia or Florida or SOMEWHERE for a week this winter. Just because I can.
That has nothing to do with what I was going to say, though. I had this really specific thing in mind. And here it is:
In November of 1998, I went to Boston. Amanda came with me and we picked up a kid named James in Pittsburgh. We jammed Simon & Garfunkel's "America" the whole way there. And some Pat Benatar, too. The whole weekend was a blast. We visited a friend of mine at MIT and I unabashedly smoked a cigarette in one of their service elevators. Just because no one else was there and I could. We walked the campus at Harvard. We hung out in Harvard Square. We ate lunch at this cute little cafe called The Greenhouse. I think. We went candlepin bowling. We went into a gigantic bookstore. We went up into New Hampshire. It was great.
But that has nothing to do with what I was going to say, either. That's geography, background. I'm just laying the foundation. You'll see in a second what I really meant. What it all means. Are you ready for it?
We drove all night to get back to Michigan. We were driving I-80 down the Pennsylvania turnpike at around 5:30 in the morning and the sun was coming up. We'd put Led Zeppelin's Zoso in. The sun started to hit the fog in all the tiny mountain valleys and vaporize it. It was blue, then purple, then pink. I felt like we were being given a small glimpse into something bigger than dawn on the Pennsylvania turnpike, but it was disappearing as fast as we could take it in.
It's always disappearing. Everything is. Constantly. And to quote Ferris Bueller, "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it."
That was one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. And it was completely by accident...
Funny how that happens.
Or how you forget to let it happen.