1. The Deke and I were up and at 'em this morning and hit the road around 10:30 to begin our trip back to Greenbelt. We stopped at Metuchen, NJ to have lunch with the Deke's cousin Sally. We went to Anthony's Coal Fired Pizza and enjoyed a green salad and chicken wings. We had a good time catching up on all the different changes in our lives and ruminated upon what the future might bring and when one or both of us might be traveling to the eastern U.S.A. again.
2. We left Sally's around 2:00 and rocketed down the New Jersey Turnpike and on through Delaware and into Maryland. This must have been about the fifteenth time I made this drive between Greenbelt and Nyack over the last three years and I'll miss it -- I'll miss crossing the Susquehanna River and, later, going over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, the feeling of being a part of America on the move with all the other vehicles on the NJ Turnpike; I'll miss those New Jersey Service Plazas named after famous New Jersey people like Joyce Kilmer, Walt Whitman, Clara Barton, James Fenimore Cooper and others, the Peet's Coffee at Maryland's Chesapeake House Travel Plaza, the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, the Baltimore skyline looming to the west of I-895, and driving from Nyack to Tarrytown across the Hudson River on the Tappan Zee Bridge. I'll miss the anticipation of seeing Adrienne and Jack and enjoying their handsome neighborhood and the beer in Nanuet and Pearl River. I'll miss hopping on the train in Tarrytown and arriving in the pulsing grandeur of Grand Central Terminal, walking to Washington Square, and ducking into bars in the West Village, East Village, and the Lower East Side to talk about Shakespeare, Levon Helm, and Apocalypse Now, among many other things with Scott Shirk.
Living in the DC area, exploring it, and taking these trips from Greenbelt to Nyack, NY along with other trips I made beyond Nyack to Cooperstown and Middleboro, MA and Cape Cod gave me a deeper sense of patriotism, of being a citizen of a vast, vibrant, and varied nation than anything I had ever done in my life.
I'll miss it.
But, there's much I've left unexplored in Kellogg and North Idaho, Western Montana, and Eastern Washington over the years. It's time to get goin' out there!
3. We pulled in front of the Diaz house just in the nick of time. Molly and Hiram and David had an early evening planned attending parents' night at David and Olivia's school and so the Deke and I kept Ana and Olivia company. Ana is a two year old proficient in the verbal art of DaDa. She talks almost without stopping in a never ending disconnected stream of stories, songs she's learned, nonsense songs she creates on the spot, nonsense sentences, short plays with dolls or stuffed animals or figurines as characters, observations of family life, self-narration, and other joyous expressions of AnnaWorld with unbridled vigor and pure happiness. She walks, runs, hops, dances, skips, jumps, and sometimes falls, all the while talking, laughing, demonstrating this, pointing out that, always fully and wondrously Ana alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment