It was an almost spontaneous, Thanksgiving road trip.
First,
a weekend at home, just to settle from the work week, slowly pack, make a
couple of calls that we’re coming. Then, Monday afternoon, Ponczka and I are in
the car. It’s an easy first leg – Hamilton to Detroit, less than four hours.
A visit
to my Aunt Irene. She’s 94 and living alone in a comfortable little apartment,
and managing well. I don’t visit her often enough, but this is my second visit
this year, and she’s glad to see us. It’s our first visit since her brother, my
dad, passed away a couple of months ago, so we speak of him. He was a lively
man who enjoyed satisfying his appetites, and was just a year her junior. And one
of the things that both I and my Aunt Audrey enjoyed was that she was one of
the few who could talk him down out of his easy-flowing brashness. It was
something that brought out the little boy that remained of that old man, right
into his last year, when he seemed finally sated with life. And speaking and
laughing of it, brought out the young woman that remained in my aunt.
On
Tuesday afternoon, Ponczka and I start on the long leg of the trip, heading to
Atlanta for the holiday with my brother. But first, we tool around Detroit a
bit – the hometown I’ve loved but never missed. We survey the mansions along
Boston and Chicago boulevards, then the mangled ruins just a few blocks beyond,
and into the remade downtown, almost a different city entirely. There’s a kind
of benevolent gentrification happening – the hipsters and the young
entrepreneurs, the new construction alongside the refurbished remnants of last
century’s glories. Gentle, yet still a broom, sweeping away the old. And
Detroit, an almost entirely African-American city for a short-long while, is
being reclaimed by the children of those that abandoned it.
We’re
on the road for only a few hours, through the rush hour and along interstate
75, down into Ohio. Toledo and Dayton, around Cincinnati and into Kentucky. We find
a Microtel in Lexington and I go for some take-out chili from a nearby Waffle
House. Why is it so wonderful, this taste of the nomadic, the very ordinary
disguised in slightly shifting regional accents, the gradually warming air,
different signs and license plates along the highway? It feels like easy
adventure, but it’s really only a flip of the channel to some easily remembered
yesterdays, with accents and jabs coming from unexpected places.
The
next day, we’re back on the road. We finish off Kentucky, and get down
Tennessee. Hills and deep valleys, roadside venues selling barbecue and
fireworks, Knoxville and Chattanooga. We hit unexpected congestion more than
once. The license plates from more than a dozen states remind us that others
are travelling too – Virginia, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania; occasionally a New
York, Florida, even less Texas, Nevada, Arizona. Seeing them connects me, in
memory, in yearning, in rewriting my history over the coming shrouded days. We
finally hit Georgia and the last hundred or so miles are less interesting
because we’re tired. Even so, Atlanta springs up like an ornament, with
sparkling new buildings we don’t remember from our last visit four years ago.
Cities loom like sculpted fantasies, like those teasing visions that come in
movies, in dreams, like boasts and other tall tales.
to continue…
