May 6, 2013 - Chicago. Visited with friends in Austin - Christie and Andy for brunch and then Wendy and Ike's wedding North of town. Many Kerrville friends were there and the festivities went late, though I did not... at least not there. I headed up the highway leaving at about 9 PM, making my way to Chicago. I spent the night in Ft. Worth in a dubious hotel (the rooms around me were, judging by the sound, rented by the hour), though the price was right. The next day I found myself paralleling Route 66 for a good part of the way - reverse direction to a trip my Mother made so many years ago.
My Mother is an amazing woman. Widowed at 36, she raised six of us in the shadow of some poor choices and unintended consequences. But she was ever the adventurer. From the time we were young we were conditioned for the road. Cross country trips every summer from Alaska - crammed into everything from a station wagon one year to a VW Bug another (try that with two adults, five kids and a pregnancy!) I've ridden the AlCan so many times that its become old hat for me now.... Under my own control I must have driven it now 45 times, but if I add in all of those trips... well let's just say that I have been on it more times than years I've been alive.... I tell people that my Mom has a house in Carson City, but lives in her Toyota. And really, she should get a free one for all the years and miles she has devoted to that brand!
That is where we all get it - our desire to travel, so none of us were surprised when she told us she and her sister (Audrey) were going to drive all of Route 66 - and when she said "all" she meant all.... That is to say, every noted nook and cranny, grassy trail, dead end and cow pasture that had once been that route were on hers. She set out one day from Chicago and many weeks later she reached the shores of the Pacific in Los Angeles. She documented the drive too - with a few Route 66 guidebooks, she relived that bit of history - her own Kerouac story, though there weren't cigarettes and hard drinking. It was sisters though - and, though in their Seventies, they did their bit of flirting along the way. She collected photographs and words from those who were still there and became a bit of an expert. So much so that, some few years later as I was heading down some of the same roads in the deserts of California, I called her for ideas of where to find a meal. Barstow she knew.
She was 16, or maybe 15, when she took her first journey on her own. She'd met a young man while waiting tables in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He was working on a construction project, up from Oklahoma. He invited her down for a holiday and, with a little cash borrowed from her Grandma, Pegge bought a bus ticket for Oklahoma. Her honeymoon 4 years later was a documented journey up the AlCan in the dead of winter, a journey we repeated in reverse in 1994 or 1995 when she finally left Alaska for good. Just this year my Brother Paul and I found an old Milepost from those days and got her a copy for Christmas. A reminder of the road.
I thought of my Mom a lot yesterday as I drove the reverse of her Route 66, a lifetime of adventure that understands that, in the end, what we live are the impressions we've made and those that have maybe gleaned something from us. I've learned from her that a life worth living is one that has worth, and love and compassion - alongside a little drinking and irreverence. A full life, one of meaning and purpose when there is often so little purpose to see. She's made sense of a world that is really quite random, serendipitous, ill-timed and unforgiving. And that is a gift that I am happy to have shared in. And she reads this blog, so Happy nearly Mother's Day Mom!
Mom at her 75th this past Month, with Blues Musician friend Fitz (Clon Von Fitz)