Daily Prompt | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Road Trips

Posted on July 26, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for July 26 asks: “‘Tis the season for road trips—if time and money were out of the equation, what car-based adventure would you go on? (If you don’t or can’t drive, any land-based journey counts.)” I do not know if what follows answers the question or not, in that I do not name a place. Everywhere?

If the photo above is not the actual car my family owned in 1979, it is the model Chevy Malibu station wagon that my memory has chosen to remember as the car that my parents drove to cart my sister and me around that summer and every other summer, before 1979 and after. (My memory is not what it used to be; it is better!) Our family road trips over about two decades included weekends in Vermont (family), on Cape Cod, in Pennsylvania, along the Connecticut shore. We were not a wealthy family, so our family vacations were always road trips to a destination that we could reach in one day of driving. My father was the only driver, so this was more than fair. The long(ish) car ride was simultaneously unendurable and somehow, sometimes the only part of the trip that was worth remembering.

Given the unspoken assignment to “entertain ourselves,” my sister and I did just that. Her vast collection of dolls, the majority of which always traveled with her, were hired by the two of us to put on plays, which my parents for some reason tolerated, as we would put up a blanket in the back window as a curtain and move the dolls around in front of the curtain for the entertainment of drivers behind us. We were never pulled over.

For many of the trips, for long hours, I would allow my mind to wander and imagine life in each street sign name we passed under. Seen that way, the world beckoned with possibility. Upon arrival at our destination, I was usually discombobulated, as I often am on leaving a movie theater, and miffed at rejoining real life.

The inside of a Burlington Trailways bus, like the one I sat in. My seat is on the left side of the photo, the right side of the bus, three rows deep. The window seat when possible. Photo from their website.

In 2000, I landed a job and moved partway across the country, from the Hudson Valley to East Central Iowa. Poughkeepsie, New York, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, by bus. It was a 36-hour-long journey, across all the states required for that journey. In anecdotes, I probably make it sound like something I accomplished, when in fact all I did was sit and sometimes stretch my legs. The population of the bus was whittled down, layover by layover, because what for me were layovers for most people were destinations: Cleveland, Gary, Chicago. From Joliet on, the conversation took over the bus; we were all leaving the bus in Iowa, some in Davenport, some in Iowa City. Only two of us were going all the way to Cedar Rapids, and I was the one moving there. I was not imagining things on an epic road trip.

I cherish the memory of traveling across country by road, even if the road was an interstate, which gives one a very particular image of the nation: “This country is wide open!” punctuated with cityscapes. From my apartment in downtown Cedar Rapids, I could hear the shoosh of I-380 at night, all night.

A recent work by filmmaker Evan Mather, “From Sea to Shining Sea,” depicts the one great road trip, from the Atlantic to the Pacific in one hour and forty-seven minutes.

As we speedily travel the entire country, photographed with an iPhone, the effect is not one of rushing anywhere, but of a dreamy slowness. It is the only film I have seen so far that brings me back to my childhood travels in the backseat of a Malibu station wagon, imagining life, here, then here, always here. Never there.

Daily Prompt: Keep Your Friends Close

Posted on July 25, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for July 25 asks: “Do you—or did you ever—have a Best Friend? Do you believe in the idea of one person whose friendship matters the most? Tell us a story about your BFF (or lack thereof).”

I have been quite blessed when it comes to friends and I seem to always have had a couple friends whom I could count on for anything and share any fun. The “couple” of friends has always changed in personnel, however, and not grown, which is not a complaint, just a description. For much of my life, I was profoundly self-obsessed, and the thing about being self-obsessed is that, for a while, people who are very generous and warm-hearted will be generous and warm, but some will realize that they do not need to keep throwing love and attention down an ever-deeper well. Some will start to reflect what they are being given. In many cases, fairly or not, it could be said that we train the world in how to treat us. And in many other cases, fairly or not, we do not train the world in how to treat us. Not at all.

I have had friends abandon me when I was still present and available for them, and I have abandoned others. Neither type may have been friendships. When I was younger, I did not think “friendship” was a word that I needed to define; one had friends and that was that. Like furniture. It is only logical that I did not think one needed to cultivate or work on friendships, any more than one needed to make sure a chair remained a chair. Thus, I did not have a definition of “friendship.”

Lynne, Cubby, and The Gad About Town

I am with two great friends in the photo at right, taken recently. Through the years, life has beaten me into a state of reasonableness, and I am capable of being present for myself and thus, for and with others. (Cubby, the friend in the middle, has a blog. It is worth visiting.) In the photo, one can see the affection, but you can not see that I am holding myself up with two folding chairs I had grabbed because I left my cane somewhere in the room there. My condition, called spinal muscular atrophy, is slowly robbing me of balance and stability and the use of my legs.

Each of these two friends has helped me physically walk, even when they were annoyed at me over something. That is a pretty sweet definition of friendship. And I hope I have been there for each of them when crises came, and even when life just got irksome and irritating, which is sometimes a more meaningful part of friendship. I hope I am becoming a more meaningful friend than the one I had been for many self-obsessed years for many best friends.

My one best friend is my great love, Jen, but in her case, “friend” is exactly what she is and yet it does not say enough.

Daily Prompt: Insert Musical Memories Here

Posted on July 24, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for July 24 asks: “We all have songs that remind us of specific periods and events in our lives. Twenty years from now, which song will remind you of the summer of 2014?”

Predicting future nostalgia, or expressing nostalgia for ways we have envisioned the future in the past (a jet pack in every closet, pills for food, Tang “like the astronauts drink!”) are seductive pastimes. What will be a touchstone for my 65-year-old me in the year 2034? (I was born in 1968 and the year/decade/century in which we now reside sometimes still looks foreign or like a typo to me, even 14-plus years into it. Thus, “in the year.”)

The Daily Prompt’s question starts out with an error, of course. “We all” do not have songs that remind us of specific things. But many of us do have songs, even if, for many of us, we would find it difficult to name a specific song for something to do with each year. Going back 20 years (which is a nice, round but random number), is there a song for me for each year—not even a different song for each year, there might be some repeats on the list—that will conjure up the places, people, and aspect of that year? My immediate answer is, absolutely not, of course not. But then, thinking backwards a nice, round, random 20 years ago …

I can tell you what I was listening to incessantly in 1994. Elvis Costello’s album “Brutal Youth,” especially the song “Sulky Girl.” (I was going through my first break-up.) Any time I hear it, I become a cliche of myself, and can picture the room, the time of day (morning), the CD player (Sony boombox, three-slider graphic equalizer, terrible radio receiver). On this date twenty years ago, it is more than likely I was listening to this:

Might some song be latching onto my memories of 2014 as I am living it? Unlike “Brutal Youth,” I am not listening to anything repeatedly; no song or album is speaking to where I am emotionally now. And this has been an year (only half-over!) with deeply felt emotions, both joyous and sad. 2014 has been a year of change in The Gad About Town’s world, with two friends dying, my move away from my hometown and saying goodbye to many friends, my move to a town nearer my girlfriend and meeting many new friends. One of my recently dead friends was fond of saying, “The only constant in life is change.” Turns out he was right. (He didn’t have to prove it.)

So far this year, I have experienced a couple separate musical influenzas, fevered periods of a week or less in which I briefly could think of little else besides one song or two. Some Sun Ra. Some Jem Finer. Just before my move, it was this song by St. Vincent: