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After a
week of frigid temps
it got weird warm today, 43℉, dirt
road hard-packed snow melted into
rainslick ice, slush at the ditch
skid fringes. 4WD gets you going
but doesn't necessarily help you stop and
I experimented with tolerances, enjoyed
controlled slides on roads devoid of
school buses because the kids got a
snowday, which in Michigan is saying
something. My day revolved around this borrowed motor
vehicle--groceries and gasoline.
Filled up at Costco for $1.89/gallon and
wondered what the low price meant, then
hit Midas for an overdue oil change. The
cashier/manager, 6 years sober, spoke at
length, misty-eyed, about his best friend
who retired April 1st with enough money to
last until he was 99 but died four months
later. Travels with Charley
audio book cassette seemed a fit
companion, the early passages eerily
echoing the sorry story I'd just been
told: During the previous winter I had
become rather seriously ill with one of
those carefully named difficulties which
are the whispers of approaching age.
When I came out of it I received the
usual lecture about slowing up, losing
weight, limiting the cholesterol intake.
It happens to many men, and I think
doctors have memorized the litany. It
had happened to so many of my friends.
The lecture ends, "Slow down. You're not
as young as you once were."
Steinbeck's wish to see the country and
meet its populace inspired me to
seek out company and I fell in with some
geezers (like me!), talking tools
and trampolines in a bar staffed by women
only, as if cast by Fellini, all the
screens tuned to sports interspersed with
ads for ED. Life's a trip,
and as Steinbeck says, we
don't take trips--trips take us. His words
seem brave or perhaps, to some, hazardous:
For I have always lived violently, drunk
hugely, eaten too much or not at all,
slept around the clock or missed two
nights of sleeping, worked too hard and
too long in glory, or slobbed for a time
in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled,
chopped, climbed, made love with joy and
taken my hangovers as a consequence, not
as a punishment.
It's strange to
have read these words at 19 only to
revisit them 30 years later. What
happened in
between?
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