Never Ever

Carol had an itch to see her mom who recently had a stroke and has not been doing so well, so Thursday or Friday we decided to make a flying trip down to see her.  We hit the road around 8 Saturday morning because we simply will not drive through LA on a weekday.  That’s the real problem with the trip.  You have to drive through LA.  There’s just no way around LA; well there is a way around it but it takes forever.

sbescondido 

Google maps says its 214 miles from where we live to where Carol’s mom lives—not that far from where Joan and WB used to live, but now do not.  On Friday, after we decided to go down there, I started feeling more than usually morose and it took me a while to realize I was unconsciously dealing with the fact that this trip would be the first time EVER that one of those two, Joan or WB, would not be there at the end of the line. 

I used to hate driving down there because one of them would be at the end of the line, so what the heck was I morose about.  I guess words like NEVER OR EVER pack a wallop.  I don’t know that I believe in a grieving process, but I think there are grieving events.  This trip down was one such, a sort of reminders of how things once were but will never be again.  So down in the unconscious I was turning that over and not far behind that the old “death thang” that has plagued me lo these many years.

I would like to see many places but for the getting there.  I wish they had developed that Transporter like they had on Star Trek; hell, I would pay twice the plane fare if I got to use one of those Transporters.  It would be worth it not to have to drive a car 214 miles through that hair raising traffic with nuts all around you in those monstrous vehicles people drive these days.  So not to feel utterly at the mercy of the situation, I drive too fast I guess.  I averaged over 70, closer to 75, going down and back making it both ways, both times in about 3 hours and 20 minutes.  Zoom!  With one pit stop down and one pit stop up. 

It takes bladder control and pre-bladder preparation to get through LA.  I mean you just don’t get off the freeway any old place going through LA to take a leak because you don’t have the faintest idea what you might be driving into.  One guy wrote an article about having a flat and pulling off the freeway to get it fixed, and his driving to six different places before he found somebody who spoke English.  By 2050, they say, 60 million people will live in California and it will be a multi-multi ethnic state. 

Anyhow we made it down and we made it back, and trying to go to sleep last night, I would start drifting off and then bump awake when I dreamed about a car come head on at me in my lane.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*