Dotted lines
Listen to the brambles and gravel crunch underneath the tires as you pull away from the curb. Feel the engine spit and gurgle while it awakens from its nap. See familiarity slip away in your rearview mirror as you round the corner. Taste the gusts of air sneak in through an open window. Smell diesel and hot asphalt and oak trees and dry grasses blend into a perfume of motion.
The road opens its arms and welcomes you into its universe.
What outwardly lookes like escapism is, in reality, an avenue to real introspection. You get to it by getting away from it. This is widdling away the distracting minutiae and focusing on the bigger picture.
This is the crucial combination of meditation's repetition and adventure's novelty: Dotted lines and whitewater. Dotted lines and skylines. Dotted lines and diners. Dotted lines and rolling green hills. Dotted lines and pink semis. Dotted lines and old friends in new lives. Dotted lines and new friends. Dotted lines and revelations, large and small.
Connection from disconnection.
Let me engage in this world, but remind me why I'm doing what I'm doing. Yank me away from my world and let me see another existence. Strip away preconceptions and blase dismissals. Usher me back to my world refreshed and enlightened.
I never found in a church what I find on the road. Maybe our church just doesn't have a roof.
So, here's to you, Caretaker of Ruth.
4 comments:
The auto is his time machine. It swallow him whole and spits him out into the hedonistic thrust of a vivacious Saturday night downtown. It's his Sunday afternoon escape. It's his Tuesday morning wife that greets him at the door. It's his extentsion into real life. It doesn't become him, yet it is becoming of him. It is now just him.
J. Gaspar
I'm sure I saw that car in New Jersey. Rock on, Brad! Way to complete the epic journey of epic journeys.
What a perfect ode to a remarkable and challenging way of life. A life that is a collection of choices that are divergent and ephemeral but memories and stories (and blogs) that last forever. A life that I can appreciate but am not bold enough to lead.
The way his right hand passes over my dashboard as we summit a mountain pass. How his foot never lashes out on my aging acceleration- treating my tired pistons with patience. And all the times that he never let that “Dr. Kevorkian of a mechanic” talk me straight into a rusty nap. That- my fellow readers of POPNOTSODA- is why I carry my caretaker wherever he may wish to go in a proud puff of diesel fumes.
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