Making Widows Wince

The ride to work after vacation   While driving the great road home, the way I usually do, I saw a cluster of buildings. At one time they were various banks and edge companies, now they were all painted dark gray and just there, inert, not drawing any attention to the change in shade or really, moving much information at all. Why are they gray? Where are the names, the brandings? Why are they hiding their tattoos from me? Is this new ‘lack of’ just a youthful form of communication left to confuse? As large empty broken down boxes bounced off my car like long dead summer cats, or Frisbee dung, I swerved over to a fast line, passing the crippled and slow, and got rebalanced on the roads edge. It was the end of vacation when everything burns, and you think, what about hope?  It seems like it’s always been a land of, “it could be worse” - a land of fixed asphalt ambitions canned in an open area of get used to it. It’s like one big lesson on bondage – of binding things ...

I picked  my daughter and grandson up early on a Wednesday morning. Over days we drove to Oklahoma for a family reunion. At the end of the family thing -- the next Sunday, I drove them to the Tulsa airport for their flight home. I said goodbye, took a picture of them standing in the dark, and drove off to make my way home alone.   Making a long road trip just the one way works best for everyone -- a thing that all loving families know to be true. That said, I felt stomach sad leaving them just standing at the airport entrance– those two had been my great companions for five straight days. We had visited the places of my youth, well, all the places along the route 66 of my youth– the Boron museums, Oatman with its donkeys, Seligman and the Grand Cavern caves, the meteor crater near Winslow and other, less formal, spots. I got to share my well-worn stories – many that my daughter finished for me after hearing the first sentence. It was a well-traveled road. ...