Drive

The windshield of this mini-van displays a brand new view of this drive home.  It provides access to more of the world.  Like the first time you smoke pot and watch the midnight showing of Talk Radio and come out of the theater to an empty parking lot and fog rolling down the street and you just feel different.  I’ve been driving so low to the ground for the last ten years while making this drive down I-57, I feel as if I’m standing on the rocks of Arches National Park at the helm of this Odyssey.  The world is new again.  I see junkyards and golf courses on the prairie I never saw on those drives.  I cannot believe the difference that twelve inches makes on my perspective. 

I’ve made this drive so often, I’ve zoned out the scenery I’ve seen so many times before.  That’s the downside of routine; there’s always something new to see, new to learn.  Routine gets in the way.  But now I see it.  I am focused.  The dad radio that usually annoys me is now the soundtrack to my drive.  The Tastee Freeze stand in Onarga, the VFW Hall in Manteno, that strange, wooden, twenty-foot arrow covered in reflecting tape pointing east near Gilman.  Maybe I once was aware of these things, but they appear new to me today. 

I like the sensation when all of your body is awake; the whole event consumed.  I haven’t had that since those first few snorts of coke many years ago.  This is substance-free though; ignited by this magical windshield.  This window.  The glass is enormous.  In daylight it adds the faintest blue tint to everything you see.  My eyes are open wide now, and I do see.  I see the signs of nature stripped from the cold.  I see families returning home from turkey and football.  I see a lone bird pecking at the remnants of a frozen TV dinner box in the median.  I see myself.  I’ve been avoiding him.  For too long.  It is all laid out before me.  It’s been laid out there before, but I chose to ignore it, hoping it would move down the street.   

           

“The tickets arrived for Missouri,” Dad says.

“Yeah, you mentioned it,” I reply.

“Oh, yes, I’m sorry.”

“That’s fine, you told me when they arrived several weeks ago, that’s all.”

“Oh, yes.”

           

It’s becoming clear that my parent’s memory is fading.  This saddens me.  To watch two people who you remember as invincible, sharp, intelligent.  Those abilities are still there, but they have to fight against age to get out now and sometimes they lose.  Things get repeated more frequently, occasionally five minutes after its been said.  It’s just the first time there is evidence they won’t be around forever.  And so many things that haven’t been said.

“Looks like all the crops have been harvested for the year,” Dad says.

“The flatlands of Illinois exposed again,” I reply.

“Did you vote this year?”

“Yeah, voted for the guy I disliked the least again.”

I know my dad’s politics.  He knows mine as well.  I cannot blame him though, he was born before WWII to parents who lived through the depression.  He is cautious when it comes to money, so he votes for the guy with the lowest tax plan.  I’ve always thought that determining your vote on who will take the least was too narrow-minded.  But then again I’ve never earned much money for the government to tax so I don’t know how it feels to write a check to Uncle Sam with four zeroes in it.  I vote on the social issues, nowadays, for the guy who is truly pro-life and keeps abortion legal.  He believes this too, so he says, but he votes for the party that stands against it, and I can’t understand this.  We talked about this once.  And my mom sent out holiday cards with me singled-out as the black sheep of the family.

“I had to go to three stores to find a fresh turkey,” Mom says from the back seat.

“It was quite good,” I reply.

“Yes, yes, Phyllis, it was excellent,” Dad says.

[silence]

“Whatever happened to your old girlfriend Rachel?” Mom asks.

“She got married, Mom, she’s a librarian at the University of Alabama.”

“Oh, who’d she marry?”

Rachel.  I haven’t thought about her since that awkward moment several summer’s ago when we ran into each other.  She was with the future, I was drinking in Sheffield’s.  It was something like two o’clock in the afternoon.  I was a total jackass.  Trying not to care that she was there, with someone else.  Disinterested.  Cool.  And she was Rachel. 

I spent so long trying to get her to watch me.  Watch me.  It turns out she was trying to get me to watch her.  So we played this game back and forth until she slapped me one day and asked me what the fuck my problem was.  I asked her the same thing.  We were playing the same game.  She was the cliché.  She was the one.  I think it didn’t work out because I thought of her in these terms.  It’s a mistake to place that kind of pressure on another person.  But I did.  A relationship should live on its own without this bullshit, not through the eyes of Hallmark and Hollywood.  And I stopped living with her.  Afraid to make a mistake, when she was begging me to make mistakes.  She tried to get through, but I didn’t let her.  And she left. 

I used it as an excuse to get drunk.  The levels of drunkenness were increased cause my heart ached and I earned it.  Waking up drunk, drinking more and more.  Smoking pot, dropping acid, and the eight-balls start showing up.  And I snorted it, smoked it.  It is called escapism, I think it’s laziness.  It is easier to hide from the things you don’t like about yourself, then confront them.  So I close down.  My friends don’t matter, my family doesn’t matter, I don’t matter.  And the American Airlines collection agency is calling about the check you bounced, the NSF envelopes from your bank are in the mailbox.  And your parents show up at the door.  At first I don’t answer.  They wait.

“Son, we just want to help,” Dad says through the door.

“Just let us in, please!”

And I open the door.  There is no judgment or threats or anger.  They stand beside me as I get up to stand.  Does it matter that I have little in common with them?  No, it is only frustrating at times. 

Yet, now I begin to watch their life slowly come to an end.  And you think about life, death.  I wonder how do I ever repay what they have done.  Will they ever know how they have helped me and hurt me?  

“It look’s like we might get some rain,” Dad says.

“Yeah, there are some dark clouds in front of us,” I reply.

“Is the car pulling to left at all, I think it needs a realignment.”

“No, it feels fine.”

“You know there’s a report that this minivan may be recalled, the screws in the cooling fan are eroding on some of the models.”

“Really, what does that do?”

“You know I had to go to three stores to find a fresh turkey,” Mom says from her seat.

“Yeah, it was really good,” I reply.

A sports car flies by us in the right lane, and the driver has his eyes closed, missing everything.