Thank you Susan.
Saturday Morning
February 29, 2020 by 16 Comments
Everything is better in the quiet car.
In the quiet car, everyone is calm.
~ Jenny Offill, Weather: A Novel (Knopf, February 11, 2020)
Photo: Matthew Jones
Driving I-95 North. In March, with Summer Breeze.
March 16, 2019 by 32 Comments
Yesterday evening. 6:55 p.m. Still at the office. I shut down my PC, grab the loose papers from my desk and toss them into my brief case. I throw on my coat and step into the hallway. It’s quiet, still. No phones ringing. No printers running. No overhead hum, the HVAC is shut down. Everyone has gone home. The building rests.
I walk to the garage. It’s been a Long week. Unexpected (and serious) issues flare up, soaking up the free oxygen. Yet, you like that don’t you? Good to be needed. Great to be needed. DK, what did you want to be when you grew up? A Firefighter, of course. Superman-DK running into burning buildings, his Cape flapping behind him, carrying out Babies. Like that, sort of, of the Suit Kind.
I’m in the car. Temperature read-out is 49° F. I’m on the tail end of rush hour. Traffic is flowing. Roads are dry. Spring, come, Now.
I slide the window down. The cool wind washes over my face, a light anesthetic, and the moment spins back passages from Sarah McColl’s “Joy Enough“, my new book in flight.
“I felt it first as a space, like a window thrown open and then a breeze through the bedroom.”
And then Sarah rises again:
“There was a breeze that day, and my hair was gathered into a ponytail, I could feel the air move at the nape of my neck.”
And then Sarah one more time:
“There were no cars on the road, and the hem of my skirt fluttered at my knees in the humid breeze.”
And with this, the weight of the week lifts, the tightness in my shoulders and neck releases, and Bliss rises.
With one eye on the road and the other on my iPhone, I flick down my Favorites playlist, turn the volume up, and then one more extra turn, and hit play. Summer Breeze by Seals & Crofts.
See the curtains hangin’ in the window, in the evenin’ on a Friday night
A little light a-shinin’ through the window, lets me know everything is alright
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Summer breeze, makes me feel fine, blowing through the jasmine in my mind
Notes: Other quotes by Sarah McColl in Joy Enough: A Memoir.” Photo via Of Figs and Roses
Saturday afternoon drive: Then the car becomes a meditation chamber
June 17, 2017 by 24 Comments
The basic instructions for beginning meditation are to sit quietly and concentrate on nothing but your breathing for five minutes. Simple enough, right? I can’t do it for ten seconds. I can turn down the lights, burn all the incense and play all the soothing music I want but, after the briefest pause, my brain will recommence to whirr, instantly, uncontrollably.
Until I get on that blissfully empty stretch of open road, that is. Then the car becomes a meditation chamber. It all happens by itself. Breathing slows, the benevolent sky swells out, almost always a blue so pure, clean and enamelled that even worries of climatic catastrophe recede for a moment. Maybe there are some clouds, artfully arranged. Choose your moment to leave town — I like to leave at around 5am, just before rush hour — and there won’t even be any traffic to speak of. Just the white noise of the purring engine to amplify the calm, blissful silence, which will at last find its way into even the most stubbornly busy mind.
Dropping into the Central Valley from the mountains surrounding the Tejon Pass is like breaking open a petit four, getting past the glossy, pretty exterior: inside is the cake. The urban surfaces of California are what we see in movies and on TV: slick, manufactured, shouting, cajoling, bamboozling, seducing, ready to sell you something. And then the confected beauty of the city gives way; now the land reaches far out to the sky. Your ears pop from the pressure change, and a sign advises you that the next gas station is 19 miles off.
~ Maria Bustillos, from “On the Road” (Aeon, May 2, 2013)
Sources: Quote – Andrew Sullivan, Ode to Highway. Photo: Guy Le Querrec (via newthom)
It’s been a long day
November 16, 2016 by 60 Comments
I-95 N.
Leaving work early.
Traffic has slowed to crawl at the notorious rush hour bottleneck at Exit 8 in Stamford, 10 minutes from home. There’s a towering billboard overhead shouting: Think Train. (Or something like it. Let’s not let facts get in the way of a good story.)
My Speed: < 5 mph and slowing. Red tail lights flashing and aglow in all directions on six lanes.
There was unusual calm in this moment on the asphalt.
And then ––
There’s the unmistakeable crush of metal on metal…
I snap my head up to see an oncoming car bearing down on me in the rear view mirror.
Everything moves in hyper slow motion now…
I brace for impact. [Read more…]
5:00 p.m. Bell: Heading Home
October 3, 2014 by 11 Comments
Driving. To Exit 9.
August 7, 2014 by 28 Comments
It’s Wednesday evening.
I’m on my commute home from work.
Traffic is flowing on I-95 North.
A school of fish gliding down a rapid current.
He drips into consciousness at Exit 5.
There are three words on a piece of tattered cardboard, written with a thick, black, felt pen.
The words are stacked.
Homeless.
Hungry.
Help.
My thoughts shift to a Netflix movie. I’m replaying scenes from 13 Conversations About One Thing as I’m chewing up highway. John Turturro: Life of predictability. Fullness of routine.
He stands at the same Exit. Exit 9. My Exit.
There’s a stop light at the end of the long exit ramp.
You can’t avoid him, unless you are at the back of the line in rush hour.
And then you pass him at 15 mph as you negotiate the corner.
White male. 35-40 years old. Clean shaven. Average weight and height. A coat a bit heavy and oversized for the season, but not unusually so. His eyes, those eyes, emit distress.
Addict? Alcohol? Prescription Drugs? Coke? Meth?
Unemployed? Unemployable? Record?
Bad decisions? Bad luck?
He doesn’t give much away.
[Read more…]
Mad Max: 1 – Bull: 0.
May 23, 2014 by 14 Comments
Just another Friday morning commute.
Mind is pond skittering. Nothing heavy on the calendar. Chance to leave early. Long weekend. Kids home. 58° F. Morning sun warming with forecaster calling for more Spring heat. Gnawing on a protein bar. Windows down. Feelin’ light. Feelin’ Gratitude.
Ray P comes sauntering in. His Detroit Tigers’ baseball cap is slung low. His pants hiked way up and cinched with a belt burnishing a oversized golden buckle. A middle aged client from 20 years back who inherited a small sum from his Mom who had the foresight to dribble out food money in monthly installments. Mail was unacceptable. He had to pick it up. He’d bite his lip hungrily ripping open the envelope…stare at the check, look at me: “Son, I’ve got the world by the a**.”
I’m at the speed limit in the center lane, flowing with the other fishes, no obstructions this morning. Son, I’ve got the world by the a**. [Read more…]
Saturday afternoon Drive. Hmmmm. Too Young To Die
May 3, 2014 by 35 Comments
Which reminds me of one of my favorite David Crosby tunes.
↓ click for audio (David Crosby – “Too Young To Die”)
Sweet old racin’ car of mine
Roarin’ down that broken line
I never been so much alive
Too fast for comfort
Too low to fly
Too young to die
Thank you Jack for sharing.
Imperative groin thunder. I felt like an idiot. But I went with it.
December 23, 2013 by 19 Comments
Hands Down, 2nd place finishers not close. This was the best Car Review I have ever read. Full-stop. A few selected choice excerpts:
Car and Driver called the roadster “the best Lamborghini ever.” The guys on BBC’s “Top Gear” didn’t just name the original Aventador the best supercar of 2011, they raced it down a runway against an F-16 fighter jet. (The car won.)
I’ve mostly owned rusted-out Jeeps and Volvos…But then (in an Aventador we) roared home along the roads of rural western New Jersey, where we live. At the tap of the gas pedal, the landscape turned into a smear. So this is what a 691-horsepower engine feels like.
I pulled the car into my daughter’s high school’s parking lot, and I half-accidentally revved the engine as I came into view. The resulting snort of sound made six dozen pairs of eyeballs swivel in our direction. The only way I can describe this blast is to borrow a phrase from the rock critic Lester Bangs: “imperative groin thunder.” I felt like an idiot. But I went with it.
The attention, sad to say, is mostly from men. High-performance sports cars are a bro thing. Men will scamper across six busy lanes of Interstate (as two did while I was pulled into an A & W burger stand) just to run over to pull at their crotches and ask you about the transmission. Women mostly wince as if they’ve caught a whiff of your Axe Body Spray.
And rappers have uttered some delicious lines about them. In his song “To the World,” Kanye West declares: “Pulled up in the A-V-entador / And the doors, raise up, like praise the Lord / Did the fashion show, and a tour, and a movie, and a score / This a ghetto opera, Francis Foreign Car Coppola.
On the way, how fast did we drive? (The car’s maximum speed is 217 m.p.h.) Faster than I am willing to admit. Fast enough, if only for short bursts and only when the highway was clear, that I could imagine either A) being Tasered by a state trooper or B) blasting off into low orbit over the Monongahela Valley.
Airliners take off at 140 to 180 m.p.h. It’s not a joke to suggest that this car, which does 200 m.p.h. without thinking hard about it, could get airborne. [Read more…]
Live & Learn 