On the road again

Westward, ho!

June 1-3, 2014

On the road again 

We left first light Sunday morning, Roz and I, because we were to pick up Tom Nashe in Lexingford at nine. From there, the plan was to drive straight through until we got there: Kansas, The Sunflower State, U.S.A.

          Roz was going to see one of her college roommates, who’d moved back to Wamego to take care of her older brother. He’d fallen apart sometime during the late sixties. He was that much older. She was in the fifth grade. He’d been to Vietnam and back or several bad psychedelic trips and back or both; in any case, he had come home broken, with no king’s horses and men able to mend but two parents willing to take care of him, as long as he stayed straight even if he also stayed mad, as long as he kept trying, or pretended to keep trying, at one thing or another. So, he lived in the basement and mowed lawns, shoveled snow, carried firewood, this and that, whatever charitable friends would give him; and they lived above and watched over.

          Fred. The sister was - is - Agnes. She went on to graduate school in education, then taught most of her career at the The University of Florida − we’d visited her in Gainesville not long after her divorce. She was married for ten years to a guy with the personality of a mushroom (not the kind her brother ate): there were no children. She drifted a bit but always aware of the current and ready with a paddle when it came time to get back on course. She seemed to know where she was going eventually, but there was no hurry to get there; so, she could move like a summer’s day. She was sunny and warm − good-natured and good-humored − and, though it doesn’t seem to me to fit that temperament, she was extraordinarily canny when it came to reading people (or meetings or classrooms or . . . towns, I imagined). Perhaps, she still is; I hope so; we shall see.

          Why she felt compelled to come home  when her mother died . . . Maybe we shall see as well. That was in November. She managed to find a job mid-year teaching fifth grade in Manhattan. “It gives her something to do,” Roz said some time ago when we started thinking about the trip. “Maybe it’s fun for her.”  I said, “I hope so.” (I seem to be full of hope, even if it is “hope against hope,” as the Apostle said.  Whatever he meant by that, I mean hoping even though you’re not particularly hopeful.)

          We were going to stay − now, we are going to stay; actually, at the time I write this, we are already staying there (in Manhattan) with Roz’s parents, the three of us in three separate bedrooms in the basement.  It’s not as bad as it sounds.  It’s a walk-out basement.  The bedrooms all have windows above ground.

We left just before first light Sunday. There was, however, some confusion, first about how to get to Lexingford and then how to find Tom’s house. We still travel by map and directions. And we didn’t have directions to the house, because I’d been there, as Roz said, hundreds of times, which meant, honestly, at least twenty-five and probably closer to fifty; but it’s one of those places that’s never where it’s supposed to be until you stumble on it and think, “Oh . . . yeah.”

          Still, we weren’t much late; and Tom was ready to go and ready to drive as soon as he threw his ancient (extremely heavy) Gladstone bag in the trunk or wedged it in between this and that, because he didn’t want his “gear” tumbling around in the trunk, only heading down the road with the rest of us and our stuff.

We had decided, “What the hell, we’re not that old,” though Tom is ten years older than I am, at least. But: “What the hell, we’re not that old!  Why don’t we drive straight through?”

          So, we were off. Easy enough to follow our route on a map: I-64 to St. Louis; I-70 the rest of the way − with two detours.

We got to Columbia, Missouri − driving in two-hour shifts, Tom taking the first; I took the second, Roz the third, and so on − we got to Columbia sometime after eleven at night. Nashe, who was on the trip, because he’d never been in Kansas “that I remember,” remembered, however, a payphone at a Phillips 66 station on Providence Road, just off the interstate. Or, he said he’d remembered, but his friend Bill Sommers may well have told him, knowing Nashe didn’t “believe” in cell phones, “though,” Sommers said about that later, “I’m pretty sure he’s seen at least one.” It was Sommers Nashe was calling, because he’d promised he would if he ever got back to Columbia, where they’d both spent some time at the journalism school, though “it didn’t take and didn’t profit either of us,” according to Tom. He’d gone on to what he’d gone on to do, philosophy. Sommers somehow got on to writing bits for comedians too many to count, some of them funny, according to Sommers, some of them not. “The comedians!” he insisted.  “The bits were all funny, every damn one of them.”

          We met Sommers at a bar called The Thirsty Turtle, because it wasn’t far from where we were, it wasn’t far from the interstate, and it wasn’t all that slick, a chain store that looked like someone’s mom and pop ran it.

Tomorrow: what didn’t happen that night in Columbia and our second detour, the Beecher Bible and Rifle Church, Wabaunsee before first light.

 y