Sometime just before I get to Mt. Pleasant, the final Hawkeye game of the season is starting, the one against Minnesota. On the radio they are winding up the pregame show and they recall a great Hawkeye game of the past against Minnesota. My nostalgia for the Hawks fills up my thoughts, and suddenly I burst into tears. Then I cry most of the way from Mt. Pleasant to Burlington. It's an odd sight, too, a single guy, sitting low in his black MR2 sportscar, speeding to Burlington, with tears flowing and a face contorted with sobs. By the time I get to work, it's better. But when I head home again, it starts all over, for a while at least.
Fairfield to Burlington. Burlington to Fairfield. Fairfield to Burlington. Burlington to Fairfield. Fairfield to Burlington. Burlington to Fairfield. It happens all the time. I live and work in Fairfield. But I teach tennis in Burlington. At the country club. At the indoor club. In Burlington I am a tennis pro. In Fairfield I am an advertising consultant, college teacher, administrator, improv theatre director, public access TV activist, writer, ballroom dancer and a tennis pro. But things are simple in Burlington. Just tennis. And tennis is the only way I make serious money. Everything else I basically subsidize.
So I drive, quite a bit, Fairfield to Burlington and Burlington to Fairfield. I've got the cruise control. I've got the sporty MR2. I've got the tapes and the four favorite stations punched in on the radio. I got a ticket once. Left home too late. Speeding about 68 mph. Now I just go 60, figuring that no one will pick me up for the five miles over. I get passed all the time. And sometimes when I'm not in a hurry I just set it at 55 and let all the folks wonder why the sportscar driver is crawling along. At 55 it's "no worries, mate." No big brother to hassle you. And also, Highway 34 is a fairly major road kill area. At least it seems like it, though it's probably just average for this area.
So I like to drive 55 because I feel like if you inadvertently hit an animal at the speed limit, it somehow was karma, but if you hit an animal when you were speeding, there was that individual inception of free will that contributed to the animal's demise. So I'd feel worse. And it could be serious for me, too. Because there are a lot of deer that cross that road. And it's one thing when a truck hits a deer, and quite another when a little car like mine does. The deer gets it bad either way, of course. So now when I drive late at night I'm scanning the ditches for problems in addition to watching the road. Of course, the smart deer this year are wearing day-glo vests so they stand out clearly while jumping out of the fur-colored ditch grasses. But we don't see many smart deer. in our area. And the other ones are virtually invisible. I haven't hit any of the latter yet, but I've missed a few.
On a drive that you make this often, you see places that you'd like to stop, but you rarely do. I've got a fantasy that eventually I'll stop at every restaurant along the way. I've stopped at almost all the gas stations, and all the Dairy Queens. But the place that I wanted to stop at for a long time was the lapidary/gem place in New London. In the summers I work at the country club from 9 in the morning until 9 at night, with a break in the middle of the day. So I drive by the gem place before it's open in the morning, and after it's closed at night. I finally got off early one day and came back west in the p.m., and sure enough, the gem place was temporarily closed just that afternoon. I finally did get in one day, though, and had a great talk with the owner about amethyst caves, which are formed during volcanic activity. I have one, about a foot high and eight inches deep. But that guy had actually stood in one in a gem show in Texas.
I also finally stopped at the geode chapel/grotto on the wayside just as you leave West Burlington. It was built about 50 years ago, neglected, renovated, neglected again, and now has received its second renovation. It's a curious combination of the local abundance of geodes and divine aspiration.
I also stopped, but maybe fifteen times, at the Dairy Queen-type place on the east side of New London. They had the best root beer freezes that I could find. That's a root beer float in which the two ingredients have been mixed together into one smooth, drinkable treat. The ones in Mt. Pleasant were bigger, but the New London ones still seemed to have the best consistency. The only thing I didn't like about the New London place was that you couldn't see who you were buying the things from. When you walk up to one of these roadside ice cream places, they typically feature a glassed-in room with little sliding windows that they can put your purchases through. And you can usually see the person who is giving you your food through the window above the sliding window. But this place has a poster of some gooey cocoction in the place where you usually look through to see who you are buying from.
For me it's slightly unsettling to buy something from somebody I can't see. It's as if the food and money transaction were the only important thing going on. Kind of like those sheets with the hole in them in the movie "Like Water for Chocolate," okay for procreation, but God forbid if the people actually see or touch each other naked. So, one day I noticed that there was an inside counter on the side of the place, and I went around to the entrance and walked in. It turned out that it was their last week of operation before closing for the season, so I was lucky to get in.
But maybe I should have stayed outside. I mentioned how nice it was that they had a walk-in section, but they said that they hate it, it's just a bother. I asked if they would take a bit of customer feedback, and they said that they get more advice than they need. Undaunted, I launched into my explanation of how I would like to be able to see them through the window above the screen, but they were unaffected. I guess that "root beer freeze" was all that they wanted to hear from me. And then I asked if the root beer logo displayed on the spigot for root beer was the logo of the brand that they served, and they said "yes." Which was the first positive statement they had made, but it was bad news for me, since that's the only type of root beer I know that's laced with caffeine. No wonder I liked it. But I'm trying to avoid the stuff.
So, I've stopped stopping there. But they don't notice, since they're closed. Not to mention that they only know me by my wallet and my hands.
But I keep finding new places to stop. One of the best stops I ever made on Highway 34 happened while I was still driving. First I stopped listening to the radio. Then I stopped thinking about my day today or tomorrow. The chatter in my brain stopped. Suddenly, I had the beautiful aspect of the awareness of a condemned man on his way to his execution, such that every view of far off trees, of clouds over the Iowa green, while the train chugged silently east, was as precious to me as if it were the last time I'd ever see one. An existential, zen moment. At times like that, you have to ask yourself, how many sunsets will I see? And how many dawns will I miss from oversleeping? And how many times will I actually see this beautiful place from this particular angle with this kind of lighting? Maybe just once. Probably just once.
It's because every day is different, different weather, different cars, different tasks ahead, different moods on my part, and different worlds awaiting my return. One day it's the woman I love that's waiting, who called and said, "I miss you, please hurry home," and on another day it's my silent room, the light on my answering machine relentlessly blink-free, with no messages.
Yes, I haven't stopped driving Highway 34, but I finally stopped crying. At least one day I did. Because I wasn't pouring out tears and feelings for the Iowa Hawkeyes. That was just the minor upsurge that brought out the flood of real feeling left over from a major romantic breakup the week before. Finally the feelings were flowing, and being expressed, and finally I could admit that it hurt, despite all my efforts to be nice about her need for "space."
It's strange to drive and cry at the same time. But it can easily happen. If you have just broken up with somebody, you can cry almost anytime. Maybe you think that men don't cry, but it's not true. They're not supposed to cry. But they do. Men usually take break-ups and divorces a lot harder than women. And it's because most men don't have a life, a social life anyway, outside of their relationship with their wife. And when that goes down, their world collapses.
Women have usually built up a firm foundation of friends that provide their support group to catch them when the building of their romantic relationship crumbles. But most men don't connect much with women because they don't know how to be friends with women and are avoiding infidelity, and they are often in competition with men, so who do they turn to?
The radio, of course. But it's a mistake. Especially country and western. I defy any man who has just gone through a breakup that he's not pleased about to listen to even one hour of country and western while he's driving and not crack up in one way or another. It's just not safe. There's more breakups and "You done me wrong" and "You picked A Fine Time To Leave Me, Lucille" songs on those country stations than you can shake a stick at. Yes, it seems that most of the major victims of relationships in our country (Translation: people who have not recently looked in the mirror at the real source of their problems) end up writing country western hits that make other guys feel bad, too. Usually, of course, it's guys who already feel bad. To everyone else they are all just catchy tunes with a country flavor.
As a matter of fact, you can tell if you are finally over her if you can listen to country and western at all. And rock and roll, easy listening, rhythm and blues and all the rest aren't far behind. I finally listened to Whitney Houston's scat operatic pop song "I'll Always Love You" the other day on the way home from Burlington without popping out even a single tear. It was amazing, listening to a song about saying goodbye and not crying at all.
And it's good that I've stopped. Because it's not every day that people shed tears from Fairfield to Burlington, and Burlington home to Fairfield again. It's too nice of a drive to do that all of the time. You want to keep your eyes clear to see the changes. And to watch for deer.
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