Case,
Through a combination of not having much money, being averse to flying and enjoying the solitude of the open road, I drove pretty much everywhere for the first two decades of my adult life. Just in round-trips between the Gulf Coast of Florida — where I lived three separate times for a total of five years and somehow managed to go to the beach only twice — and Chicago, I logged more than 20,000 Interstate miles. Factor in all the cris-crossing among Arkansas, Missouri, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Georgia and the total is close to 50,000 miles. (Side note: I can't teach you a damn thing about the upkeep of a car other than to say that your Grandpa Pallister's obsession with regularly changing the oil has served me and my vehicles well, and I will remind you to do the same once you reach driving age roughly 1,000 times a year.)
There are advantages to traveling alone.
They include being able to blast music at a socially unacceptable volume for long stretches if you so choose. I will warn you, however, that this should only be done when you have the road mostly to yourself. If you're in traffic, turn it down — even if Thin Lizzy is playing.
Also, and this is strictly a guy thing, if you decide you'd like to make a trip from, say, Northwest Arkansas to Chicago (roughly 650 miles) and make only one stop — and then just for the three minutes it takes to fill up your gas tank — you have that option. I will not go into specifics about exactly how a man pulls off such a feat (ask me someday) because your mother is becoming increasingly horrified as this sentence draws to a close.
Finally, the open road can serve as a creative outlet. Traveling thousands of miles gets to be monotonous. You need to find something to occupy your mind other than loud music. In that context, the road became one of my favorite places to "write." Out there, among the yellow lines and mile markers, you've got nothing but time (even when you're hurrying and refuse to stop to use the bathroom), so the road was my laboratory. I would spend hours going over lyrics, trying to get words and phrases just right (syllables are key!). You'd be surprised how much information you can hold in your head (when you obsessively refuse to stop driving unless you absolutely have to). I spent countless nights in hotel rooms, your Grandma Pallister's family room and what passed for a living room in the various apartments I owned scribbling down what I had unlocked in my various travels during long days on the road. For about a five-year stretch, there is no way I would have been nearly as productive had I not taken advantage of the aforementioned solitude.
But all good things come to an end. You won't always be traveling alone. Sometimes, you are forced to stop and smell the roses. Or stop at a rest area.
Once I met your mom, that put the brakes on my days of loud music and no bathroom breaks. But your mom travels well, and when it was just us, she accommodated — at a lower volume — my awesome and varied musical tastes, and we still made good time.
Then you came along. Though you are not quite 2 years old, you've logged your share of Interstate miles. And I must admit you are a great traveler, too. But our latest round-trip from Annapolis to Chicago reminded me that's it not easy to adjust to traveling as a family man.
It was one thing to turn the music down. The tunes were still the same, they were just a little restrained. But your obsession, albeit incredibly cute, with Sesame Street ("Melmo!" "Nernie!" "Num-num!") led your mom to buy a CD that chronicles the travails of your favorite characters and their friends in what amounts to a game of Telephone. It's a neat idea (except for the butchering of the voices, as that's not true to the art!), and it came in handy a couple of times when you got a little antsy in your car seat. It did the trick. But I pride myself on my listening choices, and here I was, driving through Maryland, then West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana (reverse the order for the ride home), and if that CD wasn't playing for real, it was playing in my head on a loop. Suffice it to say, our trip didn't lend itself to any creative productivity on my part. I used up all my mental energy trying to push all those sentences ("Elmo and Zoey will call from the zoo? Elmo and Zoey will fall into stew?") out of my head.
At one point on the drive there, I was checking the dashboard clock repeatedly, surprised at how smoothly things were going, happily doing the road math in my head. I had been able to stretch out our scheduled lunch stop (I stopped to eat in the middle of a drive maybe three times in 20 years during my single days) for a while at that point and was feeling pretty good. So, when we stopped at Wendy's, I figured maybe we could get back to driving soon enough and it wouldn't hurt our current pace. I may have said too much, though, about our charted course and my feelings related to lunch because your mom, in her ever-so-subtle way said, "We're staying here for 30 minutes whether you like it or not."
You'll notice I didn't add an exclamation point. That's because she didn't exclaim it; she said it, quite calmly, with a look in her eyes that develops once you become a mother. I can't wait for you to learn that look because it means your nonsense will be taking some of the heat off me.
Anyway, we stayed for 30 minutes, although I got a bit of a reprieve when I was allowed to get gas while you were finishing your chicken nuggets so as not to waste another 5 precious minutes.
This scene roughly repeated itself on the way back, but it was at McDonald's. And I was able to save another 5 minutes (!) by changing your diaper in the back seat while your mom waited for a chicken wrap near the end of our stop because she got upset at me earlier when I "joked" about not having any money to buy food for anyone but you.
For the record, I got you a cheeseburger Happy Meal and you loved it. While it pained me to watch the minutes tick away and killed our highway momentum (Running through my head when the Sesame Street music stopped: "We were supposed to get to Indianapolis at 2:30, not 3:30! And we already lost an hour with the time-zone change! We're not even going to average 60 miles per hour by the time we stop tonight! And by then it'll be dark! The whole day is ruined!"), I can say that I took an immense amount of pride watching you destroy an entire cheeseburger. There was something utterly American about the scene. It made me and the various eagles tattooed upon me very proud.
And that leads me to this: I loved almost all of my time driving as a single guy. No matter what was going on in my life at a given time, getting out on the open road and listening to my favorite music or spending sometimes hours at a time "writing" just made things better. It's hard to explain, but I spent the bulk of my adulthood as a loner — more often by necessity rather than choice. I wasn't made for that time alone, but I made the most of it. That time became my time because otherwise my time was filled with loneliness and self-doubt. On the road alone, I could escape all the things I could not escape in my daily life. But then your mom came along, and then you were born. So for the past three-plus years, while I sometimes miss the solitude of the road (especially when I'm yelling at the car stereo that the sentence "Elmo and Zoey have a tall bottle of shampoo?" makes no sense whatsoever) and the freedom it afforded me, I wouldn't trade it for what I have now.
As you grow older, it may not always seem like it — and I probably to some extent always will view a one-way trip as some sort of competition between myself and every other driver who ever has or ever will make that trip, including that idiot who cost me 15 minutes by holding up traffic in the left lane — but I will be happy knowing that I have a reason to slow down and stop. To eat lunch. To go to the bathroom. I will be forever grateful that MY travels turned into OUR travels.
Love,
Dad
