Tuesday night and Wednesday. Just about an hour after I left yesterday's entry, I hooked Fargo into his little kitty-harness, and I packed up one suitcase and the credit cards and off we went.
Tuesday night, I let Fargo pick our direction. He wasn't entirely happy with the inside of the car, so I pulled out onto LaSalle and looked at which window he seemed most interested in. He climbed up on the dash and looked out over the hood, so we went south. A few minutes later we were on the Dan Ryan and heading for Indiana.
People were already on the move, going wherever people go on their holidays when there's someone waiting for them. Wisconsin and Minnesota drivers passed us for over an hour, the rear windows jammed fulled of stuffed toys, blankets, the occasional shoe. It was 7:00 or 7:30, and it was too early for the children to have calmed down and fallen asleep.
Fargo is a high-energy sort of being, in a way that I am not. I get interested in things slowly, and stay interested. He, on the other hand, is a chipmunk, and spent most of the first half hour on the Skyway and I-90 through Gary running back and forth from the windshield to the back deck, the better to keep an eye on cars I passed. Eventually, traffic thinned out a little and I could settle down drive and think about things.
I remember when I was young, we were driving on this road to go back East somewhere, and I remember that we'd always drive through Chicago and Gary at night. The towers from the refineries and chemical plants still burned bright back then, and I remember that it seemed to me like driving through Hell. It smelled, it was black and rough, and those spires with orange and white flames pouring out of them... yes, this was some sort of hell on Earth.
Gary seems different now. The late 1970s weren't easy in this part of the country. They lost a lot of industry and the whole nature of the place changed. Many people moved out, to Texas, to Georgia, to Florida. Many never came back, even though the economy has largely recovered now.
I was tempted to stop off at Notre Dame University. I had friends in the Minnesota Golden Gopher Marching Band, and they hated The Fighting Irish with a passion. At least one of them had some "alternative" and rather funny and dirty lyrics to the Notre Dame Fight Song, and every time I hear it now I laugh.
I didn't stop. It was getting to be around 8:30 and I didn't know my way around.
Tueday night we stayed somewhere in northeast Indiana, near Angola somewhere. I conveniently didn't tell the desk people about Fargo, they conveniently didn't get upset about him, and Fargo conveniently didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do.
So here I was, on the road with my kitten, in a plain hotel room in Indiana, and I had no real idea yet where I was going. I got some Chinese food from a place not far from the hotel, and brought it back. Fargo played with a piece of carrot from the fried rice, and I offered him a piece of onion but he ignored it. He seemed very interested in knocking the fortune cookie around on the floor and carrying it proudly back to me. I eventually worked this into a game, tossing the wrapped fortune cookie into the bathroom, where he'd pounce on it, knock it around, and eventually bring it back to me again. He tired out finally, and curled up behind my neck.
There was an old Gregory Peck film on television. Not one of the really famous ones... it had already started, and I fell asleep before the end, so I never found out what the film was. Old black-and-white films are reassuring to me, like a piece of history being played back for no greater purpose than my comfort. Color is unsettling in old films because when it fades, it really emphasizes how unreal the whole idea of film is.
That finally brings us to Wednesday, and to pick the day's direction I let Fargo walk around on the open pages of the atlas. I'd opened it to Ohio, and, like all cats, he found it irresistable. They have to sit on newspapers and magazines, or just anything you find interesting. He eventually stepped squarely on Akron.
Does that sound like a stupid way to pick a destination? Maybe it was. But I had no better reason, no better motivation, so we packed up, and off we went.
It was gray. No way around it. As we went into Ohio and went through the entry gateway to the Turnpike, the sky was pencil-lead. Nothing less. The highway there is incredibly, maddeningly flat. Miles and miles and miles of this gray billiard table laden with mini-vans.
When something occupies part of my thoughts, a distinct and constant part -- like driving or skiing or cycling -- the rest of me is free to wander around inside itself. Think about things I might not think through at other times. I spent the morning and afternoon thinking about a lot of things.
I should have been nicer to my mother. She was a good lady, and I never realized it when it might have mattered to her. I'm not talking about premonitions of death or things like that, but more that while I was growing up, I think I could have showed my mother a little more affection. We weren't that sort of family, not the type to hug and squeeze and pat the way I saw others do. We just didn't do that. But I feel like that might have been something that came from my father, and that my mother had resigned herself to it long before I was born. Maybe it would have meant something if I could have broken away from that cycle, been a little more outward in the affection I had for her. My father didn't see it, and I think she'd stopped looking for that from him.
Yet, as I sat there, the Honda gliding across northwest Ohio, I had no idea what else I could have done. By the time I realized there were other things I could have done, could have said, I think she'd written me off, too. I was busy with other things, taken up with college, and I had slipped past the point where it had mattered. My father had the chance to break away from what he had learned from his parents, and didn't. I had the chance too, and I hadn't. I failed them. I failed her. It wasn't a pleasant drive.
I thought about people from the past quite a bit. I thought about the ways we lose touch with people, just by breathing in and out and letting it happen. I wondered how many people were thinking the same about me, wondering "whatever happened to Jeanne?" Probably no one. Other people hadn't gotten the strings of their life clipped short, leaving them cut loose in space, falling. It was just me. No family any longer, not really any friends near, trying to weave myself into a new life that fit better than the old one that had unraveled. I was the only one.
There was one person I thought about in particular. I'll come back to that story in a bit, but I will come back to it.
When I got near Cleveland, I lost the signal from the Toledo public radio station I'd been listening to. I hit the SCAN button on the stereo and it jumped up a few stations and settled on one of those religious channels. But I didn't punch it out immediately. There was a public-service sort of message on, and I came into it in the middle of something. One sentence jumped right out at me though.
"...when you give thanks this holiday, isn't there a way you can make it a time of thanks for others? Give your time. Make it a time of thanks for all of God's children."
Right then, I knew what I was going to do. I'd spent the entire day thinking about me. I wanted to stop that. I wanted to think about someone else. I couldn't think of a better thing to do.
Late in the afternoon, I stopped south of Akron and found a pretty small room at a Comfort Inn. After setting up Fargo with a dish of food and his kittenbox in the bathroom, I got out the phone book from the table by the bed, and started calling. I talked to a couple of people, and shortly got in touch with a shelter for victims of domestic violence and they accepted my offer to help out serving meals on Thanksgiving. I also offered whatever cooking assistance I could provide, but the woman said they had that pretty well under control.
It was that simple. I had something to do, something to get my mind off me for a while. I could do that and help out some other people in a place I'd never been before, somewhere where I was nothing more than someone willing to help. I liked that.
I still had the fortune cookie from Indiana, though tonight's dinner was a salad from the McDonald's near the exit. Fargo and I picked up the hockey game from the previous night, and this time I tired out first. I still had visions of that flat concrete running in my head as I went to sleep.