Everybody was a baby once, Arthur. Oh, sure, maybe not today, or even
yesterday. But once. Babies, chum: tiny, dimpled, fleshy mirrors of our
us-ness, that we parents hurl into the future, like leathery footballs
of hope. And you've got to get a good spiral on that baby, or evil will
make an interception. -The Tick
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| Monday, October 29, 2012 |
Gallup,
NM was somewhat unremarkable, except for the sunset, which took my
breath away. It was so cold there in the morning, about 30 degrees, that
Linc and
I did not have an early run. Instead, we got up early together, did a
quick walk, and then sat in the lobby of the hotel and had coffee and
read. Well, I read. He sat there and just drank his coffee.
We
drove to the Painted Dessert and the Petrified Forest and were
completely overwhelmed with the beauty there. I have never seen rocks
like these. The landscape
was enormous, with so many colors and textures to behold. It really was
as if God decided that he needed this spot, specifically, to test out
all His earth tones.
Driving through the Petrified Forest and Painted
Desert was the first time it really felt like
we were on the west coast. It was so far from anything I was familiar
with that the reality was no longer deniable. We weren’t back east
anymore!
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| Painted Desert Plank! |
That
night would be our last night on the road, and we stayed in Kingman,
AZ. The excitement was building, and we were ready to be finished with
the road trip.
The girls were stoked, ready to be at the beach and start a new school.
It was pretty awesome to listen to them talk about it all. They weren’t
real anxious or scared of the huge change. They were taking it on. One
more day, and we’d be arriving “home.”
It was a place where JJ and the
girls had never even been, and I had only seen for a measly 10 days.
Home was nothing
but unknowns and questions. We weren’t just dipping our toes in the
water to get a feel for things. We were grabbing the kids’ hands and
jumping into the ocean, and our floatation devices were optimism and
hope. It sounds dramatic, but it’s the total truth.
As
the girls ran through the Painted Desert, and I looked over the vast
landscape, my heart was racing. No more safety net, no more favorite
pubs, no more
incredible weekends in my little townhouse. I thought about people
sleeping on my couches in my basement, John Coltrane or Harry Connick Jr. on the ipod, and
enormous brunches after long nights around the fire pit. All of those
snapshots were a couple thousand miles away now,
and were already feeling like distant memories. It made me think of what Oscar Wilde said: "Memory is the diary that we all carry about with us."
