Left of the Dial

Reasons #1724531 and 1724532 Why I Love My Wife

When I was writing the previous entry, Top Management came into the office and started to tell me something, then stopped abruptly, looking confused. She listened for a moment, just to confirm, then said, "Why are you listening to the Stones? You hate the Stones."

Why isn’t exactly one hundred percent true—I hate what the Stones have become so much because I love what the Stones used to be so much. But even Top Management couldn’t possibly know that from my normal rantings and ravings. I don’t normally explain my hatreds. I just hate. Voluminously.

I also love her because we’re going on a trip in a few minutes and my responsibilities so far have been to shave and to be ready to drive when she says it’s time to go. Meanwhile, she’s been working her adorable little tail off for days getting us all ready, trying to do everything in as lowkey a way as possible to keep me from going insane just at the thought of all the preparation, none of which I’ve done but all of which, were I aware of it, would send me over the edge. Her plan hasn’t completely worked, but then, that’s because she’s working with such flawed material. Namely me. What can I say? She doesn’t get to go on a trip with the husband she’d like, she goes on a trip with the husband she’s got.

Just Us Justice

Went to court yesterday. Only the second time I’ve ever been, and the first time since I paid a traffic ticket back in college. The county courthouse is in a part of town I don’t normally frequent. Not that it’s a dodgy section or nothin’, just that it’s a little more traffic intensive and the streets curve unexpectedly, so I can never keep straight which way I’m going, and parking can be a mite tricky. In other words, it requires a tiny bit of mental energy, which I avoid expending at all costs.

But there I went, because Top Management learned from a clerk at the courthouse that if I showed up in person, the judge was likely to look favorably upon me. As that’s something that doesn’t happen often with me, I jumped at the opportunity.

I should probably tell you why I was involved with our legal system in the first place. A couple weeks back I was heading over the mountain to Waynesboro to pick up some pizzas. See, they’ve got a Little Caesar’s over there, which we no got over here. And in case you don’t know, Little Caesar’s pizza is cheap. Really, really cheap. As in, five bucks for a large plain or pepperoni. What’s more, our kids love Little Caesar’s. So, since we can get four pizzas for two bucks less than we can get two pizzas here in our tiny little town, getting three and then having leftovers for lunch the rest of the work more than makes it worth the price of the gas (this was pre-the recent gas gouging) and the extra forty-five minutes spent in the car. Besides, it’s a gorgeous drive. So we do that about once a month or so.

And that’s why I was heading over there a few weeks back, having just a fine time listening to Pearl Jam and talking to friend Keri on the phone. And coming the other way, quite rapidly, is a state trooper. I think nothing of it, because I’m the last car in a line of four, and although we’re all about a quarter mile from each other, we’re all going the same speed. So no biggie.

Until I look into my rearview mirror about a minute later and see the state trooper coming up behind me. Fast.

I look down and see that I’m speeding a bit. Not a ton, but a bit. What’s more, I was still on the phone and although I didn’t think that was illegal in Virginia the way it is in New York, I suddenly wondered. And sure enough, he hits his lights.

I pull over, cursing like a drunken sailor with tourette’s, and hang up the phone. Then I roll down the window and wait. And wait. And wait. And finally the cop comes up and asks for my license and registration. I give ‘em to him and wait for him to ask The Question. Which he eventually does.

"Sir, do you know why I pulled you over?"

I tell him that, indeed, I do not. Which was basically true. I had theories, but no real knowledge. Which is pretty much the case with the rest of my life as well.

But why do they always ask that? Do a healthy percentage of people incriminate themselves? "Yes! It’s because of the ten pounds of crack stuffed inside Jimmy Hoffa’s corpse in my trunk, isn’t it? Isn’t it?"

By the by, my Uncle John has been tracing our family history for a few decades now and it turns out I’m related to Jimmy Hoffa. And, no, I don’t know where he is. And, what’s more, I’ll never tell.

Anyhoo, I deny all knowledge of my criminal activities.

"Well, sir, your car was supposed to be inspected back in April," the copper says.

My mind went on the fritz. Seriously, I just blanked for a few seconds while I tried to process this. I wasn’t speeding—or at least that’s not what I was getting busted for. It’s not because I was on the phone. It wasn’t Jimmy Hoffa’s body. It was because I hadn’t had the car inspected. This I had not expected.

I pointed at the windshield. "You mean that thing?" I asked, now realizing that the big April 2004 thing might have been a tip-off. He agreed with me that, yes, it was that thing.

I thought about this, did a little counting my fingers, and had to agree that he’d caught me dead to rights. But I was still having trouble figuring out just how the hell I’d managed to forget to look at my freakin’ windshield for five damn months. I mean, seriously—five months? What the hell? I really was having trouble moving on to the next part of the conversation because I just keep fixating on that.

I was also vaguely impressed that, coming east at roughly sixty miles an hour and me going west at roughly sixty miles an hour, he’d managed to spot my telltale sticker—them’s some eyes on him. But shouldn’t he have been watching the damn road? Later I’d also wonder how the hell the cops had missed it for those five months. Shouldn’t they be doing their damn jobs better?

Okay. So he goes back to his cruiser to write me up my ticket and I’m sitting there thinking, okay, jackass, you’re busted. And you got no one to blame but your own pinheaded self. What’s more, I knew, I just knew that the ticket was gonna cost me like $85. I could feel it in my very bones.

And after ten minutes, Mister State Trooper (please don’t stop me) comes back and hands me the ticket. And I look at it very quickly and I see that it’s only $33! Calloo! Callay!

The irony of me being oh so very pleased at getting tapped for thirty-three bucks when I’d been willing to drive for an hour to save eight bucks was not lost on me even then. But, you know, eighty-five bucks versus thirty-three? When I’d been caught red-handed? I couldn’t help it. I was still pissed at myself, but nowhere near as badly as earlier, when I kept thinking that if I could, I’d clone myself, just so I could beat myself to a bloody pulp—that’s how mad I was. But no more. Now I was merely pissed at myself, rather than homicidal. What’s more, since it costs about fifteen bucks to get the car inspected, that comes out to about a buck and a quarter per month. So by being five months late, I saved myself six bucks. So that $33 ticket is really only $27. Yes, I was reaching, but in times of trouble, I do that.

So I go and get the pizzas, which have now been ready for half an hour and the drive is not nearly as pleasant as at other times. And I come home and tell Top Management about it and she begins beating herself up for not remembering that the car needed to be inspected even though she sometimes will go months without driving it, usually needing to be piloting the minivan. And I glance down at the ticket on the counter and see that there’s something I hadn’t quite noticed before.

That would be the $55 processing fee.

On top of the $33 for the ticket, that means my ticket came to…wait…hold on…that’s…carry the one…no, there’s no need to carry, so let me start over…oh, that’s right. $88. Three bucks more than I wanted to homicide myself for.

It was not a good night.

We weren’t able to get the car in to be inspected for several days, which left us short a car. No big deal, since we’ve set up our lifestyle to avoid more driving than necessary. But the Saturn’s the car I normally drive to the grocery store or the library, since it gets nearly twice the mileage of the minivan. So for four days I guzzled as I was gouged. But eventually we got it inspected.

I thought about contesting the ticket. Well, not exactly "contesting"—I mean, little as I wanted to pay the eighty-five bucks, I’m at heart something of a law and order guy: I did the crime, I should be prepared to do the time. Or pay the fine. You know. But the guy at the garage mentioned that if you show up at court and prove that you got it inspected, they’ll sometimes at least knock the fee down. Which sounded nice, and wasn’t completely news, but at some point you have to figure in how many hours it’ll take and is saving fifteen bucks worth two hours of your time? Is thirty bucks? Where’s the line?

Well, for me, it became slightly clearer this weekend when I was bitching about the processing fee, since that’s what really frosted me—the duplicity of it. If they just charged me the $88, I would have been really upset, even though it was completely my fault, because I don’t have that kind o’ cash to spare. But, hey, that’ll learn me to get my car inspected, right? Right. My fault, completely.

But it’s the bullshit way they jack the price up. If I’m going to be charged $88, charge me $88. Don’t make it $33 and then tack on some $55 processing fee. Tell you what, I’ll take the five minutes and file the paperwork for you and we’ll skip the processing fee, ‘kay? Otherwise, call a spade a spade and an $88 ticket an $88 ticket. I want no trickery from my legal system.

Well, the feller who was driving me, the brothers and the parents to dinner last Saturday night (delightful, thank you very much), said the reason they break it up that way is to save the judge’s time. See, he said, you’ll never, ever get the processing fee waived, so since the most you can talk your way out of is the $33, and even that might just be reduced, not waived entirely, people figure it’s not worth their time. Which doesn’t make the processing fee any less duplicitous. But does make it understandable. And clever.

So we decided to just pay the damn thing and chalk it up as a Life Lesson Learned. And no more pizza from Waynesboro. In fact, no more pizza for a few months, probably. Which means our children’ll think we’ve cut out one of the main food groups.

But when Top Management called to pay by phone, the county clerk said, "Well, did you get the car inspected?"

Top Management informed him that, yes, indeed we did. "Well, if you want to save yourself the eighty-five dollars, you can just come down here anytime before your 1:00 pm court date and the judge'll waive the whole thing."

Hmm. Conflicting information. But as we saw no reason for the clerk to fib, we scheduled a trip to court for me the next morning.

And now we’re pretty much back at the beginning of this piece. Damn but I can take a long time filling in backstory, can’t I?

So I park in one of Charlottesville’s two parking garages and walk to the courthouse which is located in historic Courthouse Square. Or maybe Court Square. I dunno. Anyhoo, it’s got cobblestone streets and pretty much no one around. Very pretty and historic-looking and slightly goofy, what with all these big buildings yet no people. Felt slightly post-apocalyptic.

Well, I located the county courthouse, courtesy a big sign out front which informs me that it was built in 1744. Old. Groovy. So I walk in and I have a choice of doors: Jury Room, Witness Room, Men’s, Ladies’…or the double-doors straight ahead which has no sign on it. And to get to them, I need to go through a metal detector which has no one nearby. In fact, as far as I can tell, I’m the only one in the building.

So I go through the double-doors. What choice do I have? And I find myself in court. With the judge sitting on the bench, the bailiff nearby, a prosecutor at one table, and the defendant and defense attorney at the other. And the five people sitting watching this all turn to look at me. And I look down at myself in my shorts, my sneakers with no socks and bright red t-shirt, holding Sports Illustrated and I suddenly feel very, very out of place.

Not sure what else to do, I sit down. And the judge and his assistant and the attorneys confer on when the trial should be postponed to, and they juggle dates, and talk about the defendant—a suburban-lookin’ mom in her mid-50s who looked very, very much like a neighbor of ours—and her parole. And this takes about five minutes and then it’s over and everyone leaves. Except for me.

So I go out in the hall and I catch the lady who was conferring with the judge on his schedule and ask where I should go and she explains that I should be at the County Courthouse Annex, which is attached to this building, but around the side. Oh, of course. I should have known. Duh.

So I go and that’s more like it: I walk in and there’s the clerk’s office right in front of me. Finally. Solid ground again. And they make me wait about ten minutes, then take my stuff and say, great, now, where’s the little pink slip? I look down at the two pages of the ticket and the bill showing I got the car inspected and all three of them are yellow.

"Pink…slip?" I say slowly.

Another clerk comes over to talk to me—I guess it was clear I was so stupid it was a two-person job. And they explain that I should have been given a pink slip and they frequently put it right in the glove compartment and didn’t they?

"Pink…slip?" I say slowly. "Glove compartment? Who?"

They look at each other, wondering if they’re going to need security on this one, then slowly say the exact same stuff again. Finally, they ask if I’d gotten the car inspected.

"Well, yeah," I say and point at the bill.

"Okay," the guy says. "When they inspect your car, they give you a little pink slip of paper. They normally put it in the glove compartment. We need that."

Twenty years I’ve been getting my car inspected, and normally on time. And I’ve never known this. How many other basic Adult 101 things am I unaware of? The mind reels.

So I go out to the car, leaving the yellow sheets with them. It’s a five minute walk to the garage, my heart pounding, wondering if it’s there. It is. Whoo-hoo!

I go back and the female clerk’s already made copies of my other papers, grabs the pink slip, makes a copy of that and tells me I can call tomorrow to find out the verdict.

And that’s that. I’m so very happy.

Until I’m pulling out the garage and I look at my ticket and I say, "I was just at the courthouse. If I’d had this validated, would I have just saved myself two bucks?"

She smiles brightly and says, "Sure would!"

It’s the little things. I get ‘em wrong every single time.

***

So I called the clerk’s office just now. And I said, "Hi, I’m calling to find out the judge’s ruling on my traffic ticket I got—they said I could call today. Am I calling the right number?"

The person on the other end said, I kid you not, "Probably. Hold." Click.

I waited five minutes, no hideous hold music—a bonus normally, but which had me wondering if I’d been hung up on. Finally, a different person came on and said, "The judge waived the whole thing. Have a nice day." Click.

Which had me wondering if I was the only person in my whole county who’d had a ticket thing the day before. Does that seem likely? Otherwise, how’d they know it was me?

So I got off scot-free (so to speak), about which I have very mixed feelings. I mean, I’m so glad I don’t have to pay…but I’m not sure that’s justice. I broke the law. Shouldn’t I have to face some sort of punishment? Isn't that the way this stuff is supposed to work?

I’m a conflicted individual. But a slightly less-poor one than I might have been.

Mercy

"Those who live at the mercy of others deserve our special care and concern. It should be our goal as a nation to build a culture of life, where all Americans are valued, welcomed, and protected."


President George W. Bush
March 17, 2005

Milestones and Millstones

So yesterday I posted my 100th piece on Left of the Dial and the minivan broke down. Are those two related? No, not really, I just wanted an excuse to mention that I’d hit the century mark. Thank you, thank you, one and all. Well, slightly more than one. Thanks to the thousands of you who read Left of the Dial every day. Okay, not really thousands. Hundreds, really. All right, not hundreds either. Dozens? Certainly dozens and usually scores. Scores? Score!

Anyhoo, the minivan. So Top Management’s driving around the neighborhood returning some of the thousands (hundreds? scores? dozens?) of dishes, pieces of pyrex and tupperware containers we’d accumulated over the weeks of scamming free meals. And as she pulls over to place a thank-you note in someone’s mailbox, she notices that the engine starts revving and revving, although it’s in park and should be purring like a kitten, the way it normally does. Looking down at the dashboard, she sees the Check Engine light is on.

So she comes home and mentions it to me. And being the automotive whiz I am, I spring into action, and grab the owner’s manual. It informs me that, if the Check Engine light comes on, I should make sure the gas cap is on securely—keep turning it until it clicks three times. Which I do. It seems snug as a bug in a rug but I keep turning it until it clicks FOUR times. You know, just to be sure.

Okay, now here’s the good part. The booklet says that if the gas cap *was* the problem, it will take up to three days of normal driving for the light to go out. Which seems extreme to me, but what the hell do I know?

Oh, but that’s not the good part. Here’s the good part. Right after that "three days" stuff, it says, "It is not safe to drive the minivan if the Check Engine light is on. Contact your dealer immediately."

So. You need to drive it for three days to see if the light will go out. But it’s not safe to drive the car at all, so don’t do it.

That’s just awesome.

So Top Management calls the dealer, and they say, oh, yeah, right, we need to see it, so bring it in right away. We can take you…let’s see…in six days.

Because, you know, when you have four kids, you can go for almost a week without a car. No sweat.

Top Management tries to explain that that’s not really so doable. But no, that’s the absolute soonest they can squeeze us in. Our kid’s neurosurgeon’s the best in Virginia and *he’s* more available than that.

[Tangent: Top Management just learned from The Boy’s ENT, Treebeard, that both The Boy’s tubes fell out, but only partway, meaning they were just scraping the hell out of his inner ears. Because, you know, he doesn’t have enough problems with that part of his little body.]

Okay, asks Top Management, well, the manual says it’s not safe to drive the car—is it going to be okay to drive it all the way into town in order to get it to y’all? Because we live about twenty miles away. And the dealer says…well…yeah, that’s gonna be tricky, all right. Yeah, that’s not really a good idea.

So, WTF? Are we supposed to teleport it there? Take a magic carpet ride? Get one of them black helicopters we sometimes seen zooming over our heads, zapping nearby cows, to give us a lift?

Cancer, heart defects, brain abnormalities, deafness: these things suck. But it seems like it’s the little things in life that really get you down.

Surgery Tails

That’s a pun (he said helpfully).

So. We’re back from Richmond and The Boy is recovering nicely from his surgery. At least, he seems to be recovering nicely. How the hell would I know? He’s not screaming or nothin’—in fact, he seems no more grumpy than he’d been the previous couple weeks when, in retrospect, he does seem to have gotten a bit grumpier each day. I think maybe his hernia was bugging him more and more and any pain from the surgery is offset by the relief over not having his poor ‘nads hurt no more.

He also got his Unusually Protruding Tailbone snipped off. Which means he can’t sit down. Of course, he couldn’t sit very comfortably before, but now he can’t really sit comfortably at all. Which is a problem but, so far, a workable one and one which I anticipate will only take a few more days to resolve. And by "anticipate" I mean "hope desperately."

There’s at least one kinda funny side-effect of his ass-snipping. When The Boy gets mad or frustrated about something, he takes it out on us by defiantly looking us in the eye and slowly and deliberately sitting down. Hard. And then he yells like, "Hey! What are you, blind or something? You *know* I can’t get up by myself. I’m sitting down here! Come over and pick me up, dammit!" How he packs all that in one fairly short bark is a mystery, but he does.

But of course he’s just had the end of his spine worked on. So yesterday he gets mad about something and he goes to do his Plopping Down punishment and right in the middle it seems to occur to him that, hmmm…maybe this ain’t so great an idear. So he’s there in this bizarre half-squat, his little butt stuck out like Denise Austin on freeze-frame (a vision with which I’m quite well-acquainted), looking pensive and angry and panicked. I wanted to leave him that way for a few minutes while I ran for the camera—I figured the workout would be outstanding for his thighs—but Top Management’s too soft-hearted. Seems she thinks babies who’ve just had surgery need to be coddled. Whatevah.

Long story short, The Boy has come through this latest ordeal with flying colors purty much intact. Since he was operated on both front and back, he’s really got no good options yet he’s been quite the trooper. And while the Tylenol with codeine is certainly a help, he’s only had one dose since nine o’clock last night, so I’m afraid I’m just gonna have no choice but chalk it up to his internal fortitude. And I think we all know where he gets that from, don’t we?

Oh, good Lord. I haven’t even posted this yet and I think I just heard a chorus of people yell out "Top Management!" Shut up, all of you.

So the whole trip wasn’t nearly as awful as we’d been anticipating. We had to get up at 4:30am but didn’t get to sleep until about 11:00pm the night before. And you know how it is. Whenever you need to get up early you always sleep terribly anyway, all worried about your alarm clock not going off at the right time. And since my beloved alarm clock was literally a birthday present—thanks again, Mom and Dad!—for my thirteenth birthday, that’s most certainly a very real possibility.

The Boy slept off and on for the hour-and-a-half trip there. So he was asleep for about half the journey, awake but happy as a clam for about another quarter of it and awake but pissed as a badger that’s just been stepped on for another quarter. Yet even when it was 5:15 and the sun’s barely even a rumor off in the distance and he was asleep and we were trying to keep him that way, Top Management and I couldn’t stop ourselves from talking to each other. I don’t know what it is about us and driving. It’s like Conversation Viagra for us or something. (Not that that kept her from snoozing on the way home—she was wearing her sunglasses in an attempt to keep me from realizing it, but after she’d been snoring gently for seven minutes I finally caught on.)

Dawn really is a lovely time of day. I’m always surprised how gorgeous it is. And, God willing, I’ll continue to be thusly surprised once every fourth or fifth year.

While I hope you never have any kids who need surgery, if you find such a thing does come to pass, you could do a whole lot worse’n Bon Secours St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond. Nice freakin’ joint. Clean, friendly, efficient. Really, a pretty rockin’ place to have your kid's tushie and jewels sliced. All things considered.

Everyone was pretty great. We got there at 6:25am (were told to be there at 6:30), and they took us a mere fifteen minutes later. Now, I think it’s kinda screwy that we’re impressed that we only had to wait fifteen minutes, but reality’s reality, and that’s pretty great. Of course, The Boy hadn’t eaten since dinner, so I was in charge of Keeping Him the Hell Away from Mom, as he’d begin ripping her shirt off the moment he got within reach of her. As someone who sometimes falls victim to that same problem, I could sympathize, but it still Just Wouldn’t Do. So The Boy and I kept touring the place while Top Management patiently waited to be called, but we couldn’t go more than two minutes in any direction, in case they suddenly needed us.

And they did. Top Management filled out a four-page form, causing me to wonder why they didn’t send us that thing a month ago when we scheduled the surgery. Is it like a restaurant’s Daily Special, where they change it every day? If we filled it out ahead of time might we have missed out on the lobster bisque?

So then they took us back to the Pediatric O.R. waiting room, where we had to wait about another forty-five minutes, but that wasn’t too bad, because there was a lot of stuff to distract The Boy with (although not quite so much that he didn’t occasionally try to denude his mother, with a frankly disappointing lack of success). And while I say we had to wait, that’s not really quite true. First we talked to the surgeon, who recognized us as soon as we walked in. Then the nurse who was going to be in the operating room came and talked to us. Then the anesthesiologist’s nurse did the same. Then the anesthesiologist. Then the surgeon again. Then the nurse again. It was all pretty impressive how thorough they were. I mean, yeah, I guess they *should* be, but alas, that doesn’t automatically guarantee they’re *going* to be. But these folks were. So rock on their bad selves. They even made sure the surgeon drew on The Boy’s right leg with a marker, to show which side he was going to be operated on later. The didn’t feel the same thing wasn’t necessary when it came to his tailbone. Apparently, in the human body, there’s only one spine. Man. How’d I miss that back in Biology class? Oh, that’s right, I slept through most of them. And then had to cheat my way through the tests. Where was Harry Potter when I needed him?

So The Boy is bopping around while we’re doing all this conversing with the medical-type persons and I’m watching him more closely than usual. I mean, you know, it’s a hard tile floor and it’s crowded and I’m thinking, very literally, that the last thing we needed at that point was for him to take a really nasty spill and fracture his skull AGAIN.

The Boy, as is his wont, is running through his signs over and over again. Mommy. Daddy. Mommy. The Boy. Love. Love. Mommy. Love. Daddy. The Boy. Max. Max. Max. Max. The Bean. The Bean. Love. The Rose. The Boy. The Rose. Love. Cracker. Love. Cracker. Love. Cracker. Love. (Yes, he has an unhealthy fixation on crackers. There are worse fixations for a guy to have. [Rest of joke censored at the request of Top Management.])

Now, for those who haven’t seen it, The Boy’s name sign is a fist banged against the forehead. He’s very fond of it and, given how much he’s practiced it, he’s very good at it. And I noticed some of the hospital personnel sort of watching him banging his head with a fist as he toddled. So we pointed out to them that he frequently begins signing before he’s even all the way awake and if, as he’s coming up out of the anesthesia, they see him banging his head, he’s just talking and not complaining of a splitting headache. Believe me, I know from complaining of a splitting headache. I have four children. And I suspect they know something of the same. After all, they, in turn, have me.

And then they took him and kicked us out. Just like that. No good-byes or anything. Which is good, really—that’s pretty much how we would have suggested it be done if they’d asked. But they didn’t. So maybe it’s always best to just whisk the kid away before he realizes he’s being untimely ripped from the loving arms of his parents and it’s hospital policy. But it might have been nice to be told that, or to be asked.

Anyhoo, we went to the surgical waiting room and were given a beeper that was about the size of a remote control, with red lights all around the outside. The lights would flash and, even better, it would buzz when you were being paged; I say "buzz" but actually it was more like a quack and, just for good measure, it’d also vibrate. If it went off, that’d mean the doctor had something to tell us and we should rush to the desk there or, if we were too far away, we could call in. We were told the surgery would be at least a couple of hours, maybe longer. So we had a lot o’ time to kill.

We were starving but we went and grabbed a couple comfy seats in a different part of the hospital, where the chairs were more comfortable, there was less noise and it was easier to people-watch. And we just had to wait. And there’s something about waiting for your kid to come out of a medical procedure which just dries up all conversation-making abilities between parents. Unfortunately, this is something on which Top Management and I are something of experts. Fortunately, just then brother Jay arrived.

If you’ve got a couple hours to spend in a hospital waiting for your kid to come out of surgery, I cannot recommend highly enough having brother Jay hang out with you. The hours didn’t exactly fly by, but they most assuredly no longer crept. Of course, talkin’ smack about the other brothers is always a pleasant diversion. (I’m kidding, guys, I’m kidding! Or I would be if you ever got around to reading Left of the Dial, you lazy bastards. I say that with love.)

And then we were buzzed. And pleasant as it was—it was in my pocket—it was also terrifying. Because it’d only been half an hour, far too soon. We hurried back to the front desk of the surgical waiting room. And when I say "we hurried" what I mean is I walked briskly and Top Management was performing her version of Official International Race-Walking Techniques. She was bookin’.

They tell us they’ve got the O.R. on the horn and they’ll transfer the call. So we go to the white courtesy phone and when it rings Top Management picks it up. And finds out that they’re just calling to let us know he’s asleep and that he didn’t fuss one smidge.

It was so nice of them to call. It was so courteous. And in the future, I think I’d wish they were either slightly less courteous, or warned us ahead of time that they were ultra-courteous. Us humans aren’t used to that much courtesy in this day and age. It just scares the shit out of us.

So the three of us decided to try to get our pulses back down out of the Just Finished Sprinting Up a Very Long and Steep Hill category and get something to eat. We’d been given coupons entitling the bearers to 10% off a meal at the cafeteria. Feh. Our old hospital used to just give you a free meal. Then again, you also had to wait, not fifteen minutes, but two hours to be called to go fill out the paperwork, so I guess that’s a pretty acceptable trade-off.

I learned three things at the cafeteria. The first is that St. Mary’s Bon Secour (you know, I’m not even sure what the official name of the hospital is) has really shockingly good cinnamon rolls in their cafeteria. They’re not the greatest I’ve ever had, but they really don’t suck. The second thing is that their coffee is also surprisingly good. They have a gourmet coffee place out in the lobby, but I don’t know why anyone goes there, when their standard fare in the caf is as good as it is.

The third thing is more of a realization: any food, other than ice cream, looks gross when it’s served with an ice cream scoop. Mashed potatoes, hash browns, whatever. Serve it with an ice cream scoop in a nice round ball and it’s just wrong. Great for vanilla ice cream. Not so much for anything else whitish.

So we eat and shoot around plans for Mom’s surprise birthday party—and if you’re reading this, Mom, then skip that sentence—and when we’re just done we get buzzed again. Heart pounding, Top Management finds a phone and calls the surgical waiting area desk as per their instructions…but the line’s busy. So she tries again. Same deal. So while she tries a third time, I go hustling back to the actual desk. And they tell me the O.R.’s on the phone and transfer the call. And they’re just letting us know they’re doing with the front half and they’re flipping The Boy over to work on his beehind.

This time their courtesy isn’t quite so frightening. But it’s still a little bit scary. A lot scary, in fact. Just not so much as before.

So then we go back to where we were before. Our chairs are now taken, though, so we move down the hall a bit. And right in front of us is something I’ve never seen before. It’s something like one of those people-movers they sometimes have in airports, a long moving walkway so you don’t have to tire yourself out by actually moving your legs. You can just stand and the conveyor belt’ll do all the work for you and move you along to your destination, like the human cattle you are. (No, I don’t really mean that—I get a kick out of those things; I sprint down ‘em as fast as I can so I can pretend I’m the Flash. Zoom! Sometimes my sentences just take on a life of their own, the little buggers.) But this one was inclined, so it took you from the first floor to the second floor like an escalator. Only there were no steps; it was just one smooth belt going up at a gentle incline.

The sign referred to it as an escalator, but it was no more like what we normally think of as an escalator than an escalator is a stairway. Likewise, it wasn’t flat, so it wasn’t a traditional walkway or people-mover. I think we need a new name for it. And I think we need it post-haste.

So we’re watching people go up and down on this thing and I noticed something odd. A lot of the guys would go up it in a strange pose: they’d put one leg in front, bent at the knee, and keep their back leg behind them, completely straight. And it was all sorts o’ guys: old, young, fat, thin. But none of the women did, no matter what their size, shape or age. What’s up with that? Do these gentlemen have unusually large testicles that preclude them from standing upright for the thirty-second ride? If so, I can recommend an excellent surgeon who does outstanding ballwork.

And then The Boy’s out of surgery. The surgeon comes and tell us in stomach-churning detail what he did. I let the details wash over me as if he were a concerned neighbor explaining all the things I do wrong when it comes to lawncare, fully confident that Top Management’s taking copious mental notes.

When he’s done he says that they’ll let us know when we can come see The Boy and that it’ll probably be about twenty minutes. After he left, the very nice old volunteer at the desk warns us at great length how they always say that but that it’s not unusual for it to be more like an hour or an hour and a half and that sometimes it’s even two and a half hours before you can go see him. "Oh," she says, as she wraps up. "But sometimes it’s only twenty minutes."

It was about twenty minutes later that they said we could go see him, and a different very nice old volunteer lead us through the labyrinthine corridors to the surgical recovery room. And there was The Boy.

He looked like hell. His skin was all mottled, his eyes were rolling, his hair was all mussed (even by our not-exactly-GQ standards) and he smelled like anesthesia, a scent which instantly catapulted Top Management and meself back nearly a decade to New York City and Max and all the times she’d smelled like that. They say scent is the most powerful of the senses when it comes to memory. I’m not going to argue.

As The Boy had now not eaten in about fifteen hours, he was a mite peckish. So he tucked in and Top Management and I talked about how awful he looked and what he smelled like and that reminded us of a kid we’ll call Jimmy.

Jimmy was about eighteen when we met him. He was an occasional in-patient on the same pediatric oncology floor as Max. He was obviously a bit old to be admitted to the pediatric wing, but he’d been an oncology patient since he was seven or something like that, and had relapsed a few times. So, since he’d spent so much time on the pediatric floor and knew all the oncologists and nurses so well, everyone just felt better about him being there. And he was an amazing kid—so smart and sweet and funny. It was so cool to see him try to fit himself onto one of the tiny chairs in the playroom, where he’d play Play-Doh with the little kids, giving their mothers a break. Awesome, awesome guy.

But the first time Top Management or I saw him was a different experience. In fact, we only glimpsed him that first time. But we heard him. Oh yes we did.

Max had been admitted for a round of chemo and we’re walking down the hall with her, pushing her big ol’ IV pole, when we hear shouts coming from one of the rooms. "I said NO, dammit!" a guy yells. "I don’t want one! Just leave me the hell alone, you stupid bitch!"

A woman comes out of the room, shaking. Top Management and I stare at each in horror. What do we do? So we go up and say very gently, "Are you okay?"

And the shaking woman turns to us and we can see that she’s not crying. She’s laughing. "Oh, I’m fine," she answers pleasantly. "That’s my son. He had anesthesia this morning. He’s always this way afterwards."

And sure enough, we find out that the yeller, Jimmy, was about the sweetest kid ever. Except when he was coming out of anesthesia. And then he turned into Mr. Hyde for the next hour. And then spent the next two days apologizing profusely for his horrible behavior.

We kinda enjoyed that.

So after about fifteen minutes they tell us that we can go. Now, The Boy just had his tailbone snipped off, so we’ve been very skeptical all along about his ability to sit in a car for at least an hour and a half and, if we hit a traffic jam like last time, two hours. But they assure us that he’s doped up and, what’s more, he’s been given a couple locals right in his butt area to numb it up good.

So okay. We make plans with brother Jay to go somewhere nearby to eat before we hit the road. He goes to hop in his car and we’re going to wait in ours before following him to the restaurant. The Boy has been alternating between zonking on my shoulder and being groggily but happily awake. He’s not really fussed much but he has seemed a tiny bit uncomfortable, sometimes liking to be cradled, a position he’s NEVER liked. And when he gets tired of that and wants to be held with his head on your shoulder, he sticks his rear way, way out in a most awkward manner, looking a little bit like Britney Spears in almost every publicity shot of her I’ve ever seen.

And when we go to put him in his carseat, not only does he wake up instantly, he immediately begins doing The Funky Chicken in a desperate attempt to get off his ass. Buckling him in was harder than it’s ever been, as he’s squirming like the seat’s on fire.

But buckle him I do. At which point he begins shrieking.

I start the car and pull out. Top Management and I are almost frantic, wondering what the hell to do. Do we go back and insist he be admitted? Do we ask for more drugs? What about some more drugs for The Boy while we’re at it? (Thank you. Thank you very much.)

We decide to keep driving to see if maybe the after-effects of the anesthesia will kick in. We call brother Jay who, understandably confused, asks where we are since he’s pulled his car around and we’re clearly no longer in the parking spot where he’d left us. Hearing the wail of the banshee coming from the backseat—I’m not sure he even needed the cellphone to be able to hear The Boy—Jay quickly susses out the scene and wishes us well on our trip home, probably secretly relieved to be done with the traveling freak show but much too polite to say so.

Fortunately, after about two minutes, right about the time we’re thinking of turning around and asking for a refill on our crack prescription, The Boy falls asleep. Midshriek, almost. Shriek shriek shriek shriek whimper out.

Not the most promising start to our return trip, but not the worst either. Having only gotten about five hours of really lousy sleep, I’d been counting on picking up coffee on the way home but that was no longer an option. So I contented myself with the sweet consolation of ninety minutes of talk-time with beloved Top Management, who kicks the bejeebers out of Starbucks without even trying.

When she’s awake, that is. Which she was for all but about ten minutes of the drive. Unfortunately, those were the ten minutes when I poured out all my deepest hopes and fears for the first and only time in my life. That’ll learn me. But that’s okay—the sheer mindbending quality of the rest of the drive made up for that one tiny little lapse in consciousness.

Meanwhile, I resolved, as I always do when driving that particular stretch of highway, to turn some of the exit signs into characters in a novel some day. I mean, really: there’s an exit for Shannon Hill—is that not a fine name for a character? There’s another exit for Louisa Ferncliff—Jane Austen weeps over her lost chance. And there’s also one for something Goochland, I forget what, but who cares? It’s got Goochland in the name! Gooch! My boy Gooch! Welcome to Goochland, where everyone’s an honorary Gooch!

I think going two days with little sleep is catching up with me. Maybe I should take the car out for a spin. I just have to go wake up my seven-year-old so she can drive.

As I’m typing this I’m listening to The Boy on the monitor; he's making little noises in his sleep. He conked out earlier than normal tonight; guess he’s kinda had a big couple o’ days too. He was really pretty chipper today, all things considered, bopping around with his funny little smile, like he knows something the rest of us don’t. I’ll bet he does too.

You know, this is the seventh surgery one of our children has had, but it’s the first one that’s ever been really scheduled in advance; all the others were sorta semi-emergencies, gotta-do-it-right-now deals or at most gotta-do-it-tomorrow jobbies. With this one, though, we had weeks to think about it. And when you’ve got that much time…things pop into your head. You don’t want them to and you pretend that they don’t but, you know, sometimes they do all the same. That’s just what happens when you’re a parent. Ideas, thoughts, images, notions about your kids pop into your head before you know it, no matter how hard you may try to avoid it. So it’s a pretty swell feeling to see The Boy trotting all over the house, attempting to pull his sister’s hair, carrying a jar of sweet potatoes he swiped from the pantry and signing his name over and over and over. A lot of things that run through my head turn out to be completely without any rational basis. That’s nothing new. I’m used to that. But it’s rarely this pleasant.

As I Was Saying...

I was driving The Rose and The Bean to play with some friends. It’s a quick drive—literally no more than about ninety seconds, even at the ridiculously slow speeds I drive; the speed limit in our neighborhood is 30mph, but I think that’s ludicrous given how narrow and winding and hilly the roads are. Add in that it’s a neighborhood that has hundreds of small children, and that from one end to the other is about a half-mile, and the difference between driving 15mph and driving 30mph means you’ll get home maybe twenty seconds later than you would have at the slower speed, while massively increasing the chances you’ll not be able to stop in time should something happen…

As you can see, I have automotive issues with my neighborhood, which I otherwise love. Beautiful joint, great people, some vehicular flaws.

Anyhoo, I’m driving the girls—who are, of course, it goes without saying but I shall say it anyway, all safely buckled in. And I’m going about 15mph because I can afford those extra seven seconds the trip will therefore take by not pushing my speed to the limit. And that turns out to be a very good thing.

Because as I’m driving down the main road through our neighborhood, I’m coming up over a small hill where the road also curves slightly. And just over the hill a sideroad intersects the main road. And I see a grey SUV coming up to the stop sign at that sideroad.

The SUV doesn’t stop. It rolls through the stop sign, even through it’s a little tough to be able to see really well the traffic coming both ways on the main road because of the curve and the hill.

Yet roll through the stop sign the SUV does. And takes a right turn. Which means it’s coming towards me now.

But the SUV makes a wide right turn. A *really* wide right turn. As in, it veers way the hell into my lane.

Now, I have to admit, I hate SUVs. Hate ‘em with a passion, even when they’re driven by people I love and respect dearly (hi, bros!). But when a car is driven in an unsafe manner, it doesn’t so much matter whether it’s an SUV or an old VW Beetle—bad driving’s not going to make me happy no matter what the vehicle. Especially when I’m carrying, as they say, Precious Cargo.

Fortunately, I was going slowly enough that there was no real cause for concern. I needed to do little more than tap my brakes to slow down even more, giving the SUV time to complete its wide right turn and get the hell back into its own damn lane.

I look at the driver as he’s coming towards me, trying to see if I can recognize the either rude or incompetent jackass. Imagine my shock when I realize that the driver is a seven-year-old boy.

My heart stopped as a thousand thoughts flooded my mind. Clearly he’d taken the SUV without permission and was going for a little joyride. I was going to have to quickly turn around and follow him to make sure he was okay and somehow try to get him to stop. But how was I going to be able to do that without freaking him out and maybe panicking him, causing him to do something very much ungood? For that matter, how was he even reaching the pedals?

All this ran through my pea-sized brain in a matter of about a second and a half. Which is when the SUV passed me. And I saw that the little boy was sitting in the lap of his mother.

Neither of them even glanced in my direction as they drove on their way.

Minor Greensboro Moments

Did I mention the weather in Greensboro? Did I mention that it was 117 degrees? And, unusually for North Carolina in July, it was quite humid too. That is some oppressive heat. But, you know, it wasn’t a dry heat.

Nice hotel, but too crowded, and I’ve never had further to walk from the nearest door to the front desk. It was a five minute walk, at least. Odd. But the walk from the closest parking space to the closest door was even further—literally, it had to be twice as far as the next-farthest I’ve ever had to walk at a hotel before. And did I mention it was a tad on the warm side?

Actually, after I dropped Top Management off and went find parking, I saw an empty space right next to the hotel. Talk about luck! But there were a couple of women with suitcases standing in the spot, just chatting, apparently having just gotten out of the car parked in the next spot. I waited a moment for them to notice me and make room, but they didn’t. And then I realized that it was intentional—they were ignoring me. But why? I’m so damn charming! Didn’t make sense. Then I realized they were actually saving the parking space for someone.

I thought very briefly of making an issue of it, but decided not to because I was in such a great mood and that would have put a damper on it. Besides, what’s the big deal? So I have to walk ten spaces further. No big whoop.

Well, as it turns out, I had to walk about a hundred and fifty spaces further, making me sort of regret my foolish attempt at staking out the high ground. And the more I thought about it, the more astonished I became. I mean, can you do that? Stand in a parking space to save it for someone? Is that "done"? I’d never heard of it before, other than Manhattan store owners putting orange cones in the space in front of their store so the delivery truck would have someplace to unload. Can you do that in a packed parking lot, save someone a space? It seemed so incredibly uncool to me, but then I don’t get out much.

It was like when Top Management and I went to see The Two Towers on opening day. Got there early, got our drinks, our popcorn and went to find seats. Well, there were six teenagers who’d staked out, I kid you not, the middle three rows of the entire theatre—THE prime seats. They’d put a coat across three chairs then sit in another seat with each of their arms out on yet another, and then they’d have another coat on their other side across three more seats, and in this way each kid was able to save nine seats. So two kids per row, taking up three entire rows. And where were all their friends? Out in the lobby playing video games.

These hotel women were sorta like that. Only they didn’t have the excuse of not being fifteen. They should have known better. And I’m willing to bet that, deep down, they did.

So later we scoped out the parking situation for the concert and drove around UNCG, Top Management’s old stomping grounds. Everyone was gone from the writing program where she got her master’s degree—although we did manage to catch up with several of them the next day, including Jim, the wonderful head of her program and who’s gotta have a picture in his attic that’s aging. So then we went to eat and afterwards stopped by a bar where a bunch of our fellow Bruce fans were congregating, and that was a ton of fun even for a hermit such as myself. Who the hell knew that talking to new people could be enjoyable? What a concept. Do other people know of this idea?

Not quite as much fun but still memorable was a sign we passed on the main route through Greensboro: House of Barber. Now, I fully admit that I’ve never thought of what the larger realm of haircuttering is called, but I guess I would have thought that a school which trains barbers was called something more like House of Barbering. Or House of Barberity. Hmm. Maybe not. House of Barbery? House of How to Cut Hair. I dunno. I even briefly toyed with the idea that it was, in fact, not actually a place where you learn to cut hair but a place which belonged to an elephant. Then I realized that would have been the House of Babar.

Oh so minor. And yet House of Barber has popped into my head unbidden several times a day for the past five days. This was how people in Firestarter knew the end was nigh.

Oh, and we saw Bruce Springsteen in concert. And that was pretty cool.

Passed and Dissed

Then there was the lady who cut in front of me when I was in line for tickets at the Will Call window.

She was the very last one on line, and I was second-to-last. And there were ten other lines, mind you. But she stood really, really close behind me. And then she stood really, really close behind me and just a bit to the side. And then really, really close and a bit more to the side. And then really, really close to my side. And then really, really close and just a tiny bit in front of me.

It was weird at first, as I felt her so close so I keep sorta inching away—you know, guarding my personal space and all. And then I realized what she was doing, and I thought about putting up a little wordless fight. But I soon realized it was pointless—she was good, boy—and more than that, it would have left me grumpy. So I let her go, although I never said anything. I just kept smiling as she oh so slowly inched her way forward. And the more she inched forward, the more I couldn’t help but smile. I mean, it kinda reminded me of the joke: what’s the definition of hubris? A mosquito with a woody floating on his back down a river screaming, "Open the drawbridge!" In some ways, that was sorta what this felt like: this was the very definition of an utterly pointless effort.

Top Management was off calling the kids when this started, and when she came back and saw that the lady behind me was now in front of me she said, "Did…did she cut in front of you?" I agreed that, yes, she had. Top Management’s jaw dropped. I assured her I was more amused than anything else—we got our tickets about forty-five seconds later than we would have, so it wasn’t a huge deal. And I decided that, hey, maybe I’d accidentally cut in front of her earlier and just hadn’t noticed and this was her payback. Or, more likely, it must have fulfilled some deep-seated need she had. Whatever. I was going to be seeing Bruce soon with my best friend by my side. That was more than enough.

But not quite enough to keep me writing about it on Left of the Dial.

So on the way home the next day we stop off at KFC to get a drink—it’s a hot day even with the air conditioning on. And besides, it’s been almost half an hour since Top Management had emptied her tiny little yet oh-so-perfect-as-is-everything-else-about-her bladder.

So we stop. And I’m waiting there in line and the gentleman in front of me, who’s been studying the menu sign up over our heads, steps up when it’s his turn and asks how much just for the salad bar. The lady at the counter looks confused and asks him what he wants. So again he says, "How much just for the salad?" And for good measure he even points at the salad bar.

Still she looks confused and says, "Well, it comes with the buffet."

"Right," he agrees, "But I don’t want the whole buffet, I just want the salad bar."

"Well, I don’t know about that," she says. "I’ll have to ask my manager and she’s in the back." He doesn’t say anything so she continues. "You should just get the buffet, ‘cuz that comes with the salad and the rest of it, so you can have the fried chicken and the potatoes and gravy and biscuit and all that."

"Right," he says, "But I’m trying to eat nutritious, so I just want the salad."

Now I should explain that the gentleman was…well, he was a big fella. So when he slapped his rather ample belly and mentioned the word "nutritious," well, you know, it became clear that he was trying hard to do the right thing. But by gosh and by golly she wasn’t gonna help none. She just looked pissed that he wasn’t happy to chow down on the fried chicken—and by the looks of him, and the fact that he was in a KFC in the first place, he knew what their chicken was like and he was a big fan and this was no easy task for him. But she refused to understand, no matter how patiently and clearly he tried to explain. Finally, she said again that she’d have to ask her manager and she was in the back right now so he’d just have to wait.

Now, his friend has already been served and is sitting at a table eating, but the guy dutifully takes a step away from the counter so she can serve someone else. So now he’s standing next to me and he notices I’m sorta smiling. "That wasn’t that hard to understand, was it?" he asks me.

I laugh. "I got it," I say.

He laughs a little too, relieved that he isn’t insane. "Man," he says. "You know, you try to eat healthy, you try to be all nutritious…" I nod and tell him I feel his pain. I think about pulling an Al Pacino and saying something about how they keep DRAAAAAAAGIN’ ya back in but decide against it. I do add that it seemed like she was practically twisting his arm.

Well, then it’s my turn, so I step up and order a large Dr Pepper for Top Management. And then I notice that they’ve got those "fresh-baked" cookies that all the fast food restaurants carry these days. Now, we ate a HUGE breakfast about two hours before, so I'm not close to being hungry. But I’m always watching out for Top Management, and who knows? She might get hungry at some point and that, my friends, would cause me immense amounts of distress. So I say, "Oh, and gimme three of them ‘fresh-baked’ cookies for a dollar, too, please."

And the lady who’d been trying to talk my pal out of the salad says, "A Dr Pepper and cookies. Oh, THAT’S nutritious."

I must have looked like a cartoon character, because I think I actually shook my head like Scooby-Doo in a "bwa-whuh?" sort of way, thinking, maybe if I shake my head really hard it’ll clear out whatever could possibly have caused me to mishear what she just said. But then Top Management, standing next to me, seemed to choke on something, so I turned to look at her and she was just staring, shocked, at the woman. Which made me suspect that perhaps, just perhaps, I hadn’t actually misheard her and that I had, in fact, been dissed on the basis of my nutritional choices by a KFC cashier.

I paid, we got our stuff, walked outside and burst out laughing. We didn’t even need to go into how incredibly "healthy" KFC’s main fare is, or how likely it is that a piece of their chicken has far more fat than three of their cookies.

I mean, look, don’t get me wrong: we love KFC. Love their chicken, their taters, their biscuits, their baked beans, the whole schmeer. But that doesn’t mean we’re not aware that it’s only very slightly healthier than sitting down with a spoon and a big honkin' tub o’ butter-flavored Crisco. Tasty stuff, that KFC. Healthy? Not so much. So the absurdity of the situation was so obvious it wasn’t even remotely necessary.

Of course, we did anyway.

Being slammed by a KFC cashier for not eating well enough. THAT, my friends, is the stuff of which memorable trips are made. And although Top Management and I didn’t need any more material for the rest of the car ride, we never turn down an opportunity to retell a good story.

So there you go.

Concrete Proof of Love

Oh so much to report from our wild and wacky getaway to scenic Greensboro. Since I can ramble for ten pages on one damn four-minute song, I’ll try to control myself. Aw, hell, who am I kidding? No, I won’t. But I *will* break it up to make each installment slightly less painful.

First of all, if Top Management thought me a schlub, she did a marvelous job of hiding it. The car ride was a joy. We talked, we laughed, we canoodled—it was fantastic. We stopped when we felt like eating, we didn’t when we didn’t, and by God if we saw a place called Concrete World on the way down and vowed to stop on the way back, well, we did just that.

And did we see some magnificent concrete lawn sculptures when we did indeed stop at Concrete World on our way back up? We did not. But we did see thousands of concrete lawn sculptures, so the quantity sort of made up for the lack of quality. I mean, we’re talking thousands and thousands and thousands of these buggers, obviously far too many to bring in at night. So they must just leave them out there on the lot after closing time. How is it that they’re not almost wiped out every single night? This place is a goldmine of concrete art, just sitting right there for the taking! You know, I think I'm less impressed with humanity's obvious innate goodness than their clear laziness. Just pull up a truck and drive away with priceless concretery!

So. There were hundreds of just different frog sculptures alone, some humanoid, some froggy, some big, some small, some happy, some sad, some dancing, some playing the banjo. Altogether I would guess there were twenty different frog designs and/or sizes with between five and twenty of each design. And that was just the tip o’ the iceberg…although, oddly enough, we didn’t actually see any concrete icebergs, come to think of it. Boy, are they missing out on a sales bonanza! Ooh! Ooh! With a concrete Titanic crashing into it! TELL me that’s not a guaranteed best-seller!

There were dwarfs and gnomes and Cabbage Patch dolls and elephants and giraffes and cows and pigs—some really quite large and realistic and therefore, I would have thought, unappetizing to look at. I was impressed with the artistry with which they’d rendered the pig’s…uh…hmmm…rectal area—and you couldn’t help but notice, if you were walking behind it as we were, so large was the entire pig and, therefore, that particular area—but jeez…who wants that? And who wants the kind of people who want that to be in your damn store?

There were concrete tables with mushrooms for the seats. There was a little naked boy gazing down at a bunny he held in his lap, the bunny reaching up to rub noses with the boy. It could have been sweet if it weren’t so freaky and disturbing. Dude. Put some damn clothes on before you put the bunny in your lap. Sheesh. Does that really need to be said? I mean, really.

Lots of fountains, too, including several of boys urinating. And they say the blue states are full of degenerates? Pig anusi, bunny-fondling and little boys peeing. Maybe I just don’t understand. If so, I hope that doesn’t change.

But I don’t mean to criticize Concrete World overly—believe it or not, I really don’t. We had a lovely fifteen minutes there and bought, yes, a frog. In fact, two frogs, since one big frog is giving another tiny frog a piggyback ride. We’re going to put it out under a tree in our yard and see how long it takes the girls to discover.

In fact, Top Management and I decided that, when our ship comes in—and it’s been so damn long in coming that it’s gonna be loaded for bear when it does finally dock, to mix a couple metaphors horrifically—we’re going to spend a couple hundred bucks at Concrete World, buying their less-disturbing pieces and scattering them around the yard, so maybe all you see are some ducks almost entirely hidden under a bush, say. And when we do, we’ll see if we can’t get one of them Titanic pieces made.

Although, it now occurs to me…that ship we’ve been waiting for? Damn…what if that WAS the Titanic? Would certainly explain a thing or two…

The Sarcastic yet Earnest Messenger

This is something I’ve wanted to write for three years now. But I’ve successfully restrained myself because I know it’s going to really piss off or, worse, hurt some people I care about. I’ve spent a bizarrely large number of hours thinking about it, though, and things have finally reached the point where I can no longer keep quiet.

How’s that for an intro?

A shockingly large number of my neighbors are criminals. I know this, because I’ve seen them break the law over and over again, making them repeat offenders. The odd thing is, they’re not only really wonderful people, they’re morally upright ones, committed to being the best parents they can be. And yet they go on, time and again, breaking the law and endangering their children in the process.

See why I’ve been hesitant to write this? Inflammatory stuff, to be sure, but I’m not kidding and I’m not exaggerating. A freakishly high percentage of my neighbors drive around our neighborhood without buckling their children into their carseats, instead allowing them to sit unbuckled, or on the floor, or in the front seat or even in the driver’s lap.

I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw it—it was so utterly outside the realm of my previous experience that I didn’t know how to respond. I was simply shocked and my brain froze. It was as though one of them had picked up a cat walking by and taken a bite out of it. I couldn’t have been more surprised.

Because these are intelligent, loving, caring, well-educated parents, regular church-goers dedicated to bringing up their children right. So the idea that they’re not just breaking the law repeatedly, but WHICH law they’re breaking…even now, I have trouble wrapping my head around it.

There are several different reasons why this situation blows my mind. One is the safety issue. We’ve all heard again and again that the majority of car accidents take place within two miles of home. Hell, I remember first hearing that when I was in third grade, so it’s not exactly breaking news.

There are several reasons for this statistic. First of all, you travel those few miles the most—even if you’re going on a three thousand mile drive, you drive that two miles closest to your house both ways. And the majority of car trips are things like errands, where you might only be going to a grocery story a mile and a half away, or to drop your kid off at a friend’s house.

But another reason is because those are some deceptively treacherous roads. You are far more likely to have to slam on the brakes suddenly in a residential neighborhood, as kids dart out in front of you, on a bike or a scooter or chasing a ball. There are pets running around and toddlers just learning to walk who haven’t the slightest clue where the driveway ends and the street begins. It’s like an obstacle course every single day.

Another cause for the higher rate of accidents is simply that people let their guards down as they travel the roads nearest home. A false sense of security takes over and they become less cautious. They become complacent, erroneously believing that so close to home on roads known oh so well nothing untoward could happen, when in reality it’s exactly the opposite.

Of course, there’s also the legal reason not to drive your children without buckling them in their carseats. It’s against the law. Boom. Pretty simple, really. Or at least you’d think so. Some folks seem to be under the impression that because we live in a development, the normal traffic laws don’t apply here. According to Lieutenant Gary Pleasants of the Charlottesville Police Department, however, those folks are mistaken.

That’s right. For this day and this day only I shed my normal skin, that of a combative, argumentative, one-sided, opinionated ranter who needs no steenkin’ evidence to back up his clear and unambiguous claims of being right. Instead, I temporarily pretended to be something like an actual reporter by calling an authoritative source who can say definitively what is or is not the law.

Actually, I’d already known it. Across the street lives a UVa cop who’s also horrified by the willful disregard for their children’s safety exhibited by so many of the parents around here. Since I’m always on a quest to be as much like Robert Novak as is humanly possible, however, I made sure to verify it with a second source. Alas, my source was willing to talk on record, so my quest must continue.

So, what’s the law? It’s really quite simple. If the state maintains the roads—as indeed is the case with half of our development’s roads currently, and soon to be all of them—then the normal laws apply. Which means, again, for those in the back row, that driving with your children unbuckled is considered reckless driving and is against the law.

Any ambiguity there? I didn’t think so either.

Now we get to what may actually be the most perplexing part: the ethical question. What kind of message is it sending your kid when you don’t buckle her each and every time? I don’t know what you think it’s teaching her, but I’ll tell you what it IS teaching her: that laws are negotiable. That you don’t have to obey the law when you don’t feel like it. That when a law is inconvenient, you can just ignore it.

Think about that. Some multi-millionaire doesn’t feel like paying his taxes? Well, going by your example, he doesn’t need to. Someone sees some CDs you’ve left on your front seat? Well, hey, why shouldn’t he feel free to liberate them? After all, it’s only against the law—and that’s not really set in stone, now is it? And we haven’t even gotten into them pesky laws that concern the taking of another’s life.

I could go on and on about this particular aspect of the problem, and in fact I have, dozens of times. But I hope the basic fallacy in the thinking is now obvious. And really, my head already hurts from trying to look at this from another angle, when there just isn’t another angle.

Finally, there’s the practical issue: if you let your kid drive around the neighborhood unbuckled a few times (or more often) when she’s two, you’ve just taught her that not only is obeying the law optional, but you’ve made your future job much tougher, as she now knows that she doesn’t always have to be buckled; you’ve just opened a door that can never, ever be shut again.

But what’s even scarier is this: you’ve just taught her that wearing a seatbelt is unpleasant. That it’s odious, a task to be avoided whenever possible. What kind of attitude do you think that’s setting up down the road? I’ll tell you this: it’s likely to come back to bite you in the ass when she starts driving. Make sure you remember that when she’s had her license for a few months and she’s now fifteen minutes late getting home. Aren’t you glad you set that fine example regarding seatbelts?

Different people have different standards of safety. When Max was two years old and getting chemo, we demoed the safety standards of the hospital playroom in which she spent twelve hours a day because, unlike all the other parents, if our kid wanted to stand on a chair, we let her stand on a chair. We did this because we were hippy-dippy parents at the time who were as permissive as possible, but we also did it because Max had been accustomed to spending five hours a day at the playground, six days a week, and now her life had changed to the point where she went to the playground twice in eighteen months. So any little bit of physical exercise she could get—and could handle—was groovy with us.

But when a two-year-old stands on a chair a lot, that two-year-old is probably going to fall sometimes. Which she did. Never with any seriously negative results—certainly no broken bones and not even any blood although, hey, if you gotta fall, what better place than a top-notch hospital, right?—but still, she fell. And each and every fall, no matter how minor, had to be officially reported. So when this particular playroom—one of about five in the hospital—saw a tremendous spike in the number of accidents it was experiencing, it got the attention of higher-ups.

Now, undoubtedly, some of the other parents there thought we didn’t care enough about our daughter’s safety. Fortunately, her oncologists and the playroom specialists disagreed and, much as it sometimes made them a bit nervous and/or bummed them out about their declining safety rating, backed us up. But still, this gives some indication of how I understand that different people set the bar in different places when it comes to safety.

But not this one. It’s one thing for a kid to fall off a chair—a chair which, it should be noted, was a kiddie chair, with its seat about twelve inches off the floor and, yes, they sucked to sit in for twelve hours a day; fortunately, I was at work in an ergonomically-correct chair for ten of those hours, leaving the lion’s share of the discomfort to Top Management, which is how our lives have always worked and, God willing, always will.

It’s quite another thing for a kid to be in a car that’s going a reasonable (and, for this neighborhood, unusual) twenty miles an hour when it slams on the brakes to avoid hitting a cat or a little kid. As we all remember from physics class, an unbuckled child in a car that stops suddenly will continue moving at the speed the car had been moving. So if you’re going twenty miles an hour and you slam on the brakes, your child will continue forward at twenty miles an hour until she slams into something which will stop her forward momentum. The dashboard, say, or the windshield are likely candidates. And a child slamming into something hard at twenty miles an hour is pretty much the same as that child getting hit by a car that’s going twenty miles per hour. What, exactly, is worth that? Saving the ten seconds it takes to buckle her? Is it? Really? Because that doesn’t sound like a decent trade-off to me.

Look, I don’t like the hassle of buckling kids into car seats either. I don’t. I’ve driven from the east coast to Colorado and back with children three times now, as well as all up and down, from Boston to southern Georgia, so believe me when I say I feel your pain. Twelve hours spent driving through Kansas with three small and bored children is no one’s idea of a good time, and we all remember how much easier car trips were when you could just move around the car anytime you got bored. For that matter, we realize that it must absolutely suck to be stuck in a carseat, and when I remember lying down on the backseat of the station wagon at night, looking up at the lights of the highway as they buzzed by, I’m sorry that my kids will never know that sensation.

But they won’t. Them days are over. We don’t love our children any more than our parents loved us, but we certainly know better now than they did. Those things were pleasant and made their lives easier, but they were also dangerous. So they’re a thing of the past. And that’s just how it is. Or how it ought to be.

What’s that you say? You don’t think kids should have to be buckled up just for a short trip around the block, despite all the evidence that says they should be? Actually, I haven’t really heard anyone say that—most people rationalize it instead, explaining that it’s either not really against the law (even though it is) or just figure (even if they don’t actually say it out loud) that they’re such excellent drivers (yeah…excellent driver…I’m an excellent driver…ten minutes to Wapner…) that nothing could possibly happen when they’re driving.

To which I say two things: 1) you have no control over OTHER drivers and if that driver coming towards you is also doing twenty miles per hour and suddenly sneezes and veers right into you (and our roads are mighty narrow indeed), or has a blowout with the same result, or is a kid who just gets nervous and jerks the wheel, well, going back to that physics class again, your twenty miles per hour plus his twenty miles per hour equals forty miles per hour for your child. That’s how fast your kid’s face is going to be going when she suddenly slams into the windshield.

And 2) that complete and total confidence in one’s own ability is one of the main factors that causes teenagers to have such a disproportionate number of accidents. They’re oh so sure of their own abilities, with frequently disastrous effects.

Still disagree? Don’t think it’s really reckless driving? That’s fine. In fact, I salute you—and I’m not kidding. An active questioning of the validity of laws is one sign of a healthy society. But the correct response isn’t civil disobedience, especially when it’s the lives of your children you’re using to make the point. No, if you don’t think it should be illegal to drive around your own neighborhood with your children unbuckled, then work to change the law. Write to your representative, your newspaper, the local police department. People can get laws changed if they want to—happens all the time, and it can be a wonderful thing to see democracy in action. Simply disregarding the law, though, is the farthest thing from a healthy response.

One of my favoritest people in the whole world used to be a pediatric intensive care nurse and she said that in the majority of cases, kids brought in with injuries from car accidents had been injured close to home. An accident on a highway is much more likely to be catastrophic, but an accident close to home is far, far more likely. And your kid probably—probably—won’t die from having her face smashed through a windshield at twenty miles an hour. She’ll probably just be disfigured. So, you know, there’s that bright side.

Or maybe she won’t go through the windshield. Maybe she’ll just shatter it with her face. Or, hey! Maybe the airbag will keep her from doing that. Of course, the reason kids aren’t allowed to sit up front anymore is because of airbags. Turns out if you’re not all full-grown-like, the airbag, instead of keeping you safe, can actually cause spinal injuries. Wouldn’t that be a peach? A forty-second ride home, a dog runs into the road and badda-bing, your little princess is in a wheelchair for life. But, you know, buckling that carseat can be a right bitch.

On the other hand, most of the newer cars have sensors so they can tell if the person in the seat is big enough for the airbag to activate safely or not. So maybe she won’t be hurt or killed by the airbag. Maybe the windshield or dashboard’ll break her fall. Good thing those are always there!

The Center for Disease Control says that about one-third of the children ages 12 years and younger who were killed in 2000 were riding in the front seat and that the force of a deployed airbag can injure or kill a young child even in a slow-speed crash. Then again, what do they know? They’re only the most reputable health organization in the world. And nowhere on their site that I could find did they discuss what a hassle bucking a toddler into a carseat can be. So take it with a grain of salt.

In our little development our developer chose a style known as "completely half-assed." The "landscaping"—if you can so abuse the term—is ludicrous, with grading that appears to have been performed by a semi-trained lemur. Our street is just barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other and, even so, one of them usually has to come to a complete stop so the other can squeak by. But it’s a steep road, and the yards slope down away from the street precipitously; in some cases, within ten horizontal feet the yard has sloped down twenty feet vertically. If a minivan goes off that road for whatever reason—snow, ice, the four-year-old who’s driving suddenly losing control—it could rapidly find itself rolling over and over and over and over again. And as we all know, a roll-over is far and away the most dangerous kind of accident. Imagine how a thirty-pound three-year-old is going to get tossed around inside that minivan as it rolls again and again. That’s if she doesn’t get tossed out the window. And then maybe rolled over.

What are the odds of that happening? Thank God, mighty low. Then again, the odds of getting in an accident while you’re travelling 65 miles per hour on the interstate are even lower. Would you consider letting your kid walk around the minivan then? For that matter, a fairly low percentage of smokers ever develops lung cancer (although the overwhelming majority of those who develop lung cancer are smokers)—does that mean you’d happily buy cigarettes for your kid?

You know, it’s funny—when I first sat down to write this, I thought I’d mainly be talking about the morality of the situation, the disconnect inherent in all these good and honest people breaking the law again and again without, seemingly, a second thought. Yet that part of it took up only a tiny bit of the piece. I guess it’s because there’s so much to say about the other factors, but what is there to say about teaching kids that it’s okay to casually disregard the law if observing the law is inconvenient? Very little, really. Frankly, it boggles my mind that it has to be said at all. And yet it seems it does.

In the end (thank God! he heard them cry), I guess it comes down to this: there are lots and lots of reason to buckle your kids for every single trip—legal reasons, ethical reasons, safety reasons and practical reasons. The only reason NOT to buckle your children in for short car trips close to home is because it’s a tiny bit irritating for you. And that’s just not really a good enough reason to risk your kid. Is it?

To anyone who's reading this who's angry or hurt, I'm sorry. I really, really am. I did it because I care.

The Voyage, Not the Destination

The Boy’s been a walkin’ fool for the past two weeks.

He started cruising a few months ago, holding onto the couch or a chair or whatever and going as far as those improvised safety rails would allow him to travel. Sometimes we’d push chairs and a footstool and large toys fairly close to each other so he could indeed range a pretty long way.

After a few weeks of that, he began to take real, honest-to-goodness baby steps, up to a half-dozen at a time. As he’s still never crawled, this was pretty exciting stuff. Top Management and I would sit on the floor, six feet apart and he’d just bop back and forth between the two of us, chortling with glee. It was great.

But then he stopped. Just gave it up. It was the oddest thing. Sometimes we could sort of trick him into it again, but even that was a chore. He just didn’t want to do it anymore. He’d still cruise, but he didn’t want to walk by himself. And he’d never, ever voluntarily let go and try for something. If he was holding onto the ottoman and the couch was four inches out of his reach, he wouldn’t let go and take the step required to grab the couch. He’d just howl. It was most odd.

But as long as he *could* reach something, he was happy. It got the point where he’d be able to go through pretty much the entire downstairs, just holding onto chairs or the wall or the toy chest or whatever. It might take him fifteen minutes to get to the train room from the living room by going all along the outside walls, but he did it.

And then two weeks ago he started walking again. There was very little build-up. One day he just started letting go of things and walking. And when he went, he went.

Within days he was walking ten feet with little problem. Then he started doing 180s, walking five or ten feet forward and spinning around flawlessly, effortlessly, and heading back.

He’d spend half an hour up in the blue room, walking from one sister to another, laughing hysterically. At night, rather than go to sleep at his usual time, he’d be up late, walking all over the downstairs, bopping from one room to another.

There was no rhyme nor reason, no method to his madness. He’d be heading straight for the wedgits, his favorite toys. But inches away he’d suddenly turn and veer off for the train tracks. He’d maybe pick one up and then he’d be gone again, this time headed for the kitchen cabinets, which he’d open and close once or twice and then he’d be off somewhere else.

This would go on for hours sometimes. He’d walk towards one of us but rarely made it all the way before he’d spin and go off in another direction. Just aimless wandering.

Except it wasn’t, of course. By the time his sisters were half his age they’d been able to crawl. So if they were unhappy or bored of being in a given location, they’d crawl off to a new one. If there was a toy they wanted, they’d crawl to get it. If they wanted Mom—and when did any of them ever not?—they’d crawl to get her.

He’d never been able to. He was always trapped, unable to motorvate anywhere he wanted whenever he wanted. And now that he could go somewhere, he wants to and he will. It doesn't matter where, really. It's the power to go, the ability to change his location that's the important thing. He's in control.

And the joy and pride and satisfaction he takes in his newfound capability to travel is awe-inspiring. It's not the destination that matters—that's nice, sometimes, but really, it's merely secondary, or maybe tertiary. No, it's the trip itself, the getting from Point A to Point B: that's the vital part of this equation.

When Top Management and I were in college together, we’d frequently just hop in the car and go. It didn’t so much matter where; we often tried to find new roads we’d never taken before but we weren’t really headed anywhere—we never stopped except for gasoline or to get something to drink. It was the going that mattered, not the getting there.

Travelling with small kids can make you forget how wonderful and fulfilling those experiences can be in and of themselves. The Boy's found that out for himself now, and reminded the rest of us in the process.

Addendum

An addendum to Monday's entry. Maybe it's not so much the "duh" category as the "ugh" category. It's not that the parents are ignorant, it's that they don't care about the children because, well, the children are unattractive. This just in:

A headline yesterday in Science Times was jolting: "Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift." As Nicholas Bakalar wrote: "Canadian researchers have made a startling assertion: parents take better care of pretty children than they do ugly ones."

Researchers at the University of Alberta observed that at the supermarket, less adorable tykes were more often allowed to engage in potentially dangerous activities - like standing up in the shopping cart or wandering off. Good-looking children, especially boys, got more attention from their parents and were kept closer at hand.

"When it came to buckling up, pretty and ugly children were treated in starkly different ways, with seat belt use increasing in direct proportion to attractiveness," the article said. "When a woman was in charge, 4 percent of the homeliest children were strapped in, compared with 13.3 percent of the most attractive children." With fathers, it was even worse, "with none of the least attractive children secured with seat belts, while 12.5 percent of the prettiest children were."

You Don't Say...

Wouldn't you think that by now this would fall well inside the "well, duh" category? Sadly, it appears not so. This just in:

Back-seat restraints best for kids

May. 2, 2005 12:00 AM
BLOOMINGTON, Ill. - "The single most important lifesaving decision parents can make for their child is to use the rear seat and age- and size-appropriate restraints during every car ride, every time," said Dr. Flaura Winston, a pediatrician and chief investigator of a study on car safety for kids released today.

The study was based on information from more than 370,000 State Farm Insurance Co. policyholders involved in car crashes.

Winston said too many parents give in to children who have grown out of safety seats and want to ride up front, where they can be hurt by air bags, dashboards or windshields.

Driving Over Miss Daisy

I don’t understand where I live. Don’t get me wrong, I like it—in fact, I love it. Hell, I chose to live here. Well, Top Management chose for me, but I could have objected. It wouldn’t have done any good, but I still COULD have.

I didn’t, though, and I’m extremely happy with our house, our neighborhood, our area—everything. The whole kit and kaboodle. Except maybe for the roads.

It’s the oddest thing. The speed limits here are almost uniformly five to fifteen miles per hour faster than they would be on a similar road in New York or Connecticut. A winding road through the countryside which might be, say, 40 or 45 miles per hour in Connecticut will be 55 here. The main street in a small neighborhood development: 20 or 25 in New York, 30 mph here. The tiny residential sidestreets, with only a dozen houses? Five, maybe ten miles per hour up north, 20 mph here.

And it’s not just Connecticut and New York, although those are the two other states I know best. My time spent in Colorado would indicate that, in the Denver region at least, it’s the same thing: speed limits lower on average than here (although they do have a wicked 75mph speed limit on I-70 in some places).

I don’t understand. It’s clearly not that folks up there love their kids more than the people down here. And it’s not that northerners are averse to driving fast, as anyone who’s spent even the slightest bit of time up there knows. So what is it? What accounts for the discrepancy? The speed limit on the beautiful, windy, hilly road that takes us into town is the same as the speed limit on major interstates. What’s up with that?

Is it maybe just an instinctive distrust of government? Folks down here don’t like people telling them what to do; they’d prefer to say for themselves what the damn speed limit is, whereas there’s a history of strong government up there, from the days of Tammany Hall on down?

I dunno. And, as I said, I don’t understand. It’s really, really odd. And it’s not like the folks up there stick strictly to the speed limit, but then again, neither do the folks down here, not even close, even what the speed limit itself’s unsafe. I don’t get it.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that they build ditches for the rainwater next to roads—hello, people! Gutters! Sewers! Radical new inventions!

Trust in Clouds

Drove over the mountain to go to church this morning—our regular church holds Easter Mass in a UVa basketball arena, making it [for me] a less than spiritually-satisfying experience.

It was a gray, drizzly morning and as we drove up I-64 into the mountains, the visibility got worse and worse until we could only see about ten feet past the front of our hood and our speed had dropped from the posted limit of 65mph down to 35mpg at one point; I was very pleased with the lights the Virginia Department of Transportation embedded in the roadway, as they were my only guide as to what was road and what was two hundred foot drop in some places.

The girls were interested but a bit disappointed—we don’t go over the mountain often and its views are normally spectacular—but we discussed why the atmospheric conditions were as they were and that kinda junk. It was a little stressful but extremely pleasant.

Or so I thought. After church Top Management and I were chatting with friends Eileen and Travis and TM mentioned that, had she been driving alone, she wouldn’t have made the drive: once things got bad she would have turned around and headed home. Our friends commiserated with her; Travis mentioned that he’d driven over the mountain at times when he literally couldn’t even see a foot past the front bumper.

I couldn’t imagine making the drive under those conditions, although there are places where it’s about ten miles between exits and I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do if the visibility degrades that much suddenly. You can’t stop—an awful lot of 18-wheelers use that road—and there are big stretches where there’s no place to turn around or pull-off.

So I was thinking about all this as we drove back. The girls had snacked on post-church scones and were all settled in comfortably. Max had had an upset stomach a few hours earlier so she was, for once, not reading under doctor’s (Top Management’s) orders. The Bean had fallen asleep, snoring softly to the strains of Beethoven’s Pastoral. The Rose was, as usual, looking out the window; of all our kids, she (and perhaps now The Boy, who has recently become a pretty good traveler, but who stayed home with Colorado Grandma and Grandpa) most appreciates the wonders of ever-changing nature flashing by the window.

There wasn’t much to appreciate this day, of course. At first there was, when we were in the foothills: rolling meadows, swollen streams, scenic herds of cows and even the surprise appearance of a bunch of llamas, making our mountainous trek seem that much more authentic and foreign.

But once we were again up top, there was nothing to see but our car, the roadlights and occasionally the brake lights of another car passing us slowly. The Rose mentioned that it was sort of creepy, but her tone of voice indicated that she very much approved. Max was looking around happily, her head swiveling from side to side, hoping to catch a glimpse of anything as the fog shifted and swirled. The Bean was drooling slightly.

I glanced over at Top Management, who was wearing a brave expression. I thought about the fact that of everyone in the car, I was the only one who really had much control over our fate. Everyone else was just along for the ride. Top Management was a bit tense, but nowhere near as much as I would have been in her situation; I’ve never been able to relax when riding—as opposed to driving—in the car with someone else, no matter how much I trust them. But the girls simply accepted our trip through the mist as another step in our journey, with complete confidence and not a shred of doubt—interesting in and of itself but mainly just a brief period on a long, long excursion.

Tripping

Drove up to Connecticut on Wednesday morning and back Thursday morning—about 1200 miles in 36 hours, all to celebrate brother John’s birthday. It was supposed to be the two days before, but snow all up and down the east coast put the kibosh on that. I enjoyed insanely good Portuguese food, decent wine (like I’d really know one way or the other), outstanding conversation and, in the car, sixteen hours of brilliant music. My ears are ringing, my back hurts and I'm exhausted—five hours sleep the night before the trip, four and a half hours at Johnny's, and about six hours last night. I’m a tarred boy. There are worse things.

One neat side effect of the trip being delayed by snow storms was how gorgeous the drive was made. I went up I-81 for about 330 miles of the drive which, if you don’t know, goes through the mountains of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The interstate also passes through West Virginia and Maryland (for about ten miles), of course, but those states aren’t mountainous at that point. The roads were cleared of snow and bone-dry, but the mountains on either side were snow-frosted and just bizarrely gorgeous. Blue skies with fluffy white clouds and no traffic made for a marvelously pleasant driving experience.

John routed me through the Torrington/Barkhamsted/Winsted area in northwestern Connecticut, so as to avoid Hartford traffic. That was an area I’d driven in quite a bit with pal Karen back in high school and college. We never had any reason to go there, really, we’d just drive around and sort of see if we could get lost and find our way back. It’s extremely rural, by and large, hilly verging on mountainous, and simply beautiful. Since our exploring was haphazard and aimless, however, we (or at least I) got to know the area but not in any systematic way, so I’d frequently be surprised to find myself somewhere I knew well but with no idea of how I’d gotten there.

Driving those roads again after fifteen or twenty years was a pleasant but strange and disconcerting experience. I’d suddenly find myself someplace I knew quite well—and it’s pleasantly shocking how little most of it had changed—but with no idea of how THIS place I know well connects to THAT place I know well. I’d get flashes suddenly, images or memories and realized I’d eaten at that place when I was going door-to-door for ConnPIRG back in college, telling folks about the pollution in their local rivers and why they should give me money to fight the good fight. And I knew I’d spent the next five or six hours walking those roads but I had no idea where those roads were or what they looked like. As I drove over the Barkhamsted reservoir, I knew I’d gone to the beach there a couple times but had no idea where it was in relation to my current location—no idea where we parked or what the beach really looked like, just that I’d gone. It was as if someone said a line from a movie and I could quote the next three lines but had no idea what movie those lines came from, when it was made, who starred in it or even what the plot was.

At one point on the way back down, somewhere around the Front Royal area of Virginia, I think, you come up on this one section of what I believe are the Blue Ridge Mountains where you’re sort of looking straight at the range from the tippy top of it, so you can see both the western and eastern faces as they stretch away from you for a few dozen or hundred miles. It’s an odd and initially confusing perspective, but just gorgeous. And there’s something about that part of the Blue Ridge for the next twenty or so miles that’s really rough-hewn and jagged and gives you such a clear idea of the violence that must have been done by the receding glaciers—you can really see how they just ripped huge chunks out of the mountainsides. Just one more reminder, in case you’d gotten complacent, of why it’s a bad idea to take on a glacier.