My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 2, #15, September, 1996

DRIVEN TO DISTRACTION

Carless and carefree I may be, but I can drive, if I have to. And, as it turned out, I had to. Big-time. It turned out that the only way to get my son and all his worldly belongings to Boston by September 1, when his apartment lease began, was to drive him, and them, 1157 miles over the Labor Day weekend--so universally acknowledged as a wonderful time to be driving, that umpteen million other people were out there on the roads as well. It served as a useful reminder that A) I'm getting older than I like to think, and b) I should always be kind to the clinically insane, because the only serious difference between them and me is that they have been formally diagnosed.

Fortunately I didn't have to do this alone. My ex-husband, Bob, agreed to participate in this mad excursion. Thank God for this. Not only did the man learn to drive in Chicago, giving him nerves of steel, but he has also driven in Boston before, a town renowned for streets that go around in circles, and streets that change names at random intervals, a town where several streets in widely divided areas have the exact same name, a town where drivers who are lost are advised to proceed at full speed as if they knew what they were doing. Picture London traffic at its worst, and multiply by ten. And reflect that Americans are raised with more aggression and fewer manners.

Bob is also the kind of man doctors might prescribe as a curative for the chronically twitchy. He is, under most circumstances, a calm, soothing person.

This is important, because I can be pretty manic. You may not know this about me, since these columns are the product of calm reflection. I may have misled you into believing that I am a serene, cheerful, rational person. And, much of the time, I am. However, I have other personalities that I normally squash down ruthlessly, and in times of stress, they tend to emerge. These personalities are A) the wicked witch of the west, and B) the white rabbit--as in Disney's Alice in Wonderland, "I'm late, I'm late for a very important date...oh my dear paws and whiskers!"

In full white rabbit mode (fret, check watch, scamper, fret, check watch, scamper), I am incredibly efficient. When my son needed to be moved previously, I arrived in town at 1:00 p.m. on a Saturday, packed and helped move all his belongings, unpacked and stashed and assembled his stuff in the new place, bought basic groceries and supplies, stashed them, removed boxes to the trash, wrote complete instructions for everything he had yet to do, slept, and left town the next day at 10:30 a.m. In full white rabbit mode I am awe-inspiring. And no fun at all to be around. Because everything will only work fine if you DO EXACTLY AS I SAY AND STAY OUT OF MY WAY.

One of my talents is the ability to eye 60 cubic feet of possessions and instantly see how they can be fit into 50 cubic feet of space. (You would think, given this, that I could also do math.) I fit his suitcase, turntable, amplifier, synthesizer, cases and cases of tapes and compact disks (I did tell you the kid was musical, right?), pillow, bedding, towels, more clothes and kitchen supplies, into one trunk and half the back seat, and we set off on our adventure.

On Thursday and Friday, the driving was not bad at all. Bob and I are both cautious, conservative drivers, who work at avoiding accidents--our own and other people's. And there was no more than the normal complement of stupid drivers on the road. Of course, we were passed by a group of motorcyclists who were unclear on the concept of passing--you pass people because you intend to go faster than they are going. Naturally, they were not wearing helmets.

(A digression: I used to be in favor of requiring motorcyclists to wear helmets, on the theory that when they maimed themselves, we paid their medical expenses with our higher premiums if they were insured, with our taxes if they were not. On the other hand, the greatest single source of organ donations is motorcyclists, who have strong bodies, great kidneys, livers, hearts--in fact, everything needed for blooming health except an intact skull and brain. As the aunt of a young man who waited two years for the kidney transplant that saved his life, I have come to feel that motorcycles are God's way of transferring healthy organs from people with no brains and good kidneys to people with good brains and no kidneys.)

Out on the road for days at a time, one comes to appreciate the simple, small pleasures of life--newly laid blacktop roads, clean public restrooms, radio stations that neither play country music nor attempt to bring you to Jesus.

By driving so steadily all day Thursday and Friday, we were way ahead of schedule, arriving in Boston by Saturday afternoon. Which is good, because we promptly got lost. We spent a lot of time trying to find Boston College. We spent an even longer time trying to find a vacant motel room. (When the lady at one motel said she had just had a cancellation, I told her I hoped she wouldn't be embarrassed if I kissed her feet.) And as a proof of the goodness of God, there was a Starbucks Coffee shop right across the parking lot from the motel. Whoever said bread was the staff of life had not encountered Starbuck's coffee and scones.

Thus fortified, we moved Brian into his apartment early Sunday morning. That sounds so simple--unless, of course, you realize that most of Boston's streets were built just wide enough for two horses to pass each other. Skinny horses.

These streets were occupied with cars and trucks parked on both sides of the street, and U-Haul trucks approaching each other in the only available remaining lane (provoking a mental image of U-Haul trucks mating in the middle of the street, producing baby U-Haul trailers.) Not only did my son's lease begin on September 1--clearly the leases of half the population of Boston did as well. After a tiny glitch (the near heart attack occasioned by discovering that, according to the map of Boston, my son's street address did not exist), we found his building. His roommate had just arrived in a pick-up truck filled with an amazing amount of furniture and other belongings.

We helped each other unload, and at 10 a.m. Sunday morning, we said "Bye, kid, have a nice life, send me e-mail," and took off, driving steadily until 7:00 that night. I kept bleating "Please stop at a motel," but we were in the mountains of Pennsylvania, where there was no flat place to put a motel. The mountains, I should say, are beautiful beyond words--and I am not one to use the phrase "beyond words" lightly. Still, I was ready to say, "OK, you're gorgeous, you've proved your point, but you can stop now, I've had enough, thank you."

The next morning, still in the mountains, I started driving and realized that I was in the middle of clouds. Now, I've been in the middle of clouds before, but I was in an airplane at the time. And someone else was driving it. But eventually the sun came out, and we came down out of the mountains, and kept driving and driving, through Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana until, at about 4:00, we realized that if we just kept going, we'd be home before the sun was all the way down.

Of course, this was now Labor Day, and the teeming millions were now also returning home. We had yet to get through the major traffic jam around Chicago/Gary/Hammond. We spent a delightful half hour of drive 6 feet, stop, drive 6 feet, stop, drive 6 feet, stop, and Bob, the King of Laidback, was beginning to grumble, even snarl--"What are these people DOING?! WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?" And I pointed out to him that soon, all the traffic heading to Chicago would turn off, and the only people left on our highway would be people who wanted to go to Iowa. And sure enough, within minutes, we were alone on the road.

This may well be a sad commentary on Americans. Iowa is a nice state, with wonderful people. It's a pity, in the abstract, that people don't much want to go there. But at that place and time, it was also wonderfully convenient. We gunned it and made it across Illinois in two and a half hours. Home never ever looked this good before.

Will I ever do this, or anything remotely like it again? No way.

The hardest part was not even the driving, or negotiating Boston streets. It was turning my life upside down. All my daily routines were gone--get up, fix coffee, feed cat, take brisk walk around the duck pond. I, a complete news junkie, who starts her day with news, watches the evening news and the local news, reads the Netizen every day, and several news magazines every week, was totally cut off from news. I, an internet addict, with large amounts of daily e-mail, was totally cut off from the net.

Now, that was hard. You see, I get lots of fan mail, coming from all of my web sites. I'm afraid I'm in terrible danger of becoming vain and self-important because of the compliments I've been getting. I hate to admit it, but I'm not all that different from my old dog, who loved jelly beans--he loved all his humans impartially, but he loved the most the one who was sitting by the jellybean dish. The internet has become my jellybean dish, and I hated being without it.

Did I enjoy the trip anyway? Or at least some of it?

In an odd way, yes. Because if you're going to spend five days in trying circumstances with someone, it needs to be with someone you like a lot. And my ex-husband is a man who knows and understands me better than anyone else in the world, a man who has never once said "Huh?" when I said something to him. That he is "ex" is for reasons that have nothing to do with our basic fondness for each other. We spent a lot of time talking--and we can talk about anything: science fiction, music, our shared past, our son, our present lives, our friends and relations, things I've said in my columns (he's my number one fan), politics, ideas I'm still working out in my head. A man who planned to be a therapist before he detoured into music, his talent has always been for listening, and for helping people with their growing up. He's a good man to clear your head.

It's a relationship we've kept alive by phone and occasional visits for a long time. But five concentrated days of shared effort and talk reminded me why he's still the best friend I've ever had.

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