March 11, 1994
"A man, if he's any good, never gets over of being a boy."
Mark Twain
I am at the Days Inn on Route 17 at route I-95 in Fredericksburg, Virginia - exactly 700 miles from Chatham. I left at 4:00am and arrived here at 3:45pm. It was an uneventful drive which is the best kind. Thank you Saint Michael.
Part of me didn't want to leave Chatham, can't explain why. But I know I need to get away, to escape top a place that is warm and familiar. Besides I have no place to stay in Chatham at the present time. So, for the next few weeks motels will be my home.
This trip is also a journey back in time, to retrace and to relive memories of a happier time. I know that such memories will make me sad and bring tears to my eyes - but so be it, after all tears of sadness are with me wherever I go.
A person's daydreams, flights of fancy, never match reality. Such thoughts exist in one's imagination but rarely, if ever, come true or ever exist. I know this, yet I fantasize anyway. Ever since I was eighteen years old, I have wanted to escape, to be free, to simply disappear - to jump into a car and travel the back roads of America, to see the USA in a Chevrolet.
I remember the summer of 1964 when me and my friend Billy used talk about running from home and driving across America, working on farms and sleeping under the stars. When you're eighteen you imagine such dreams coming to life - for the dreams are so real it sometimes feels as though you have already lived the experience. Thirty years have past and my daydreams are still the same - God's honest truth.
Even though I've been fortunate enough to travel and visit most places in the USA, I still have the same fantasies me and Billy talked about in the summer of '64 - of running away and disappearing to the Great Plains or to the Rocky Mountains. I am a hopeless cause. For the last eight years I used to take Andy, my dog, out at 9:00pm so he could do "his final business." When he was on his run, I would have a cigarette and would hear and see the Trans-Atlantic flights flying over our house as they did every night - and my mind would to faraway places, disappearing to an Irish Village or to the West End of London where I would vanish forever. And when I was outside, I would look up at the stars and think of Anne. And I would think of Mimi, of where she was, what she was doing, who she was with and was she thinking of me? Which makes me think, as I write this, if I ever loved Maggie as much as I profess to do?
The worst part of traveling alone is that there is no one to share the pleasures and excitement of the journey. So, as I drove today I talked to myself, recalling past trips to Florida - a running commentary of emptiness, solitary chatter that kept me temporarily sane and kept me from driving my car into a bridge embankment at 100 miles per hour. I also played the song, "Fade Away," by Bruce Springsteen over and over - "I don't wanna fade away, oh, I don't want to fade away, tell me what can I do what can I say, cause darlin' I don't want to fade away."
I know I have faded away from Maggie. Reality is my evil cross, my torment - there is no hope. I'm still the boy who wanted to runaway from home - now that I'm finally doing it, I'm just running because I have no home to run from.
5:00pm - Days Inn - Fredericksburg, Virginia
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