The lights are blinking yellow as I drive through Fairfax on the way home from book group. It’s still warm and the wind blows hot against my face. The heat is a creature let loose upon the earth, a menace, a fire-breathing dragon singeing my toes, dragging me down. An easy excuse. And now at the end of this hot, hot, day, I’m finally outrunning it. As I drive west it cools a bit. The swagger is gone from the day. What’s left behind is swelter.
For years I drove from Virginia to Kentucky on interstate highways. Then my brother figured out another pass through the hills. We call it the “Drew Way” in his honor. It’s part two-lane, part four-lane and it slices through some of the most spectacular mountain scenery this side of the Rocky Mountains. In one stretch of Route 33 that runs past Seneca Rocks, you feel like you’re in Colorado, skimming beside a mountain stream.
You can’t go as fast on the two-lane parts, but it doesn’t matter. The route grabs you, and you are part of the road and the hills and the motorcycle in front of you with the passenger on the back who keeps holding out her arms as if to embrace the view. There are wildflowers on the summits and cool air in the valleys. You are not ticking off the miles anymore; you are one with them.
A drive home across the mountains. No music, no news. Just the road and the ground fog, great swirling gobs of it. For more than an hour it rose from the earth, a sigh of gratitude, a bit of yogic breathing. It seemed as if nighttime was shedding its long robe, tossing it off in the first light of morning.
When my dad was a boy, he snuck out one night to hear Ella Fitzgerald at a dance club a few blocks from his house. It was a black jazz club; whites were allowed only upstairs at the bar. My dad was 12 at the time, so he wasn’t allowed in it all. But he remembers standing outside and listening to Ella, and a few months ago, he looked for the building. Here it is, a shadow of its former self, but still standing. While we were looking around the property, the owner pulled up in his truck and told us that before it was a jazz club, the oldest part of the building was a steam-powered hemp factory.
You can love a place without knowing much about it, but if you know about a place, if you learn its past and its stories, how can you not be attached?
Independence Day in the Heartland. Small flags flying. People unabashedly wear red, white and blue. A Methodist church and a sermon on national humility. All this has me thinking: How does a nation, founded in an age of belief, survive in an age of secularism? The Europeans have figured it out, but here in our earnest land, it isn’t as easy. We find it harder to say one thing and do another. Our nation is still young. At least we hope it is.
Yesterday, on my way to Kentucky, I drove along the Robert C. Byrd Appalachian Highway System as the late senator was lying in state at the capitol in Charleston. As I listened to eulogies on the radio, I zoomed along Route 33, Route 55, gorgeous curving two-lane roads and even the occasional stretch of four-lane pavement, roads to nowhere it might seem to outsiders, but not to West Virginians, of course. To them, the roads were proof their senator cared about them, that their state mattered. To generations of West Virginians, these roads are the way out of cloistered communities, a way out into the world beyond. But yesterday, they were a way back in.
Yesterday I volunteered to hold the new dean’s phone, keys, pens and other valuables in my purse while our photographer took his picture outside. This was all fine until it was time to retrieve the items. The blackberry was easy — it was right on top — the keys I fished out eventually, but to find his pens required taking everything out of my purse. This was embarrassing. I have lots of tissues in my purse. The dean was exceptionally polite and understanding and took it all with good humor. This bodes well for the future. But it feeds into every female-digging-around-in-her-handbag stereotype there is. I vow to clean up my act. You never know when your purse may be called to duty!
“It’s a great way to celebrate the beginning of things.” So goes a line (as well as I can remember it) from one of my favorite movies, “A Thousand Clowns.” Murray and Sandra are throwing confetti to pretend friends on an ocean liner (shouting “Bon Voyage, Charlie, have a wonderful time”) to celebrate their new romance, a romance that (among other things) will eventually lead Murray to re-enter the 9-5 world he loathes. (“You’ve got to live in the real world,” says another character to Murray. His response? “I’ll only go as a tourist.”)
While beginnings seem to belong more to the crisp days of fall than the swelter of mid-summer, there are exceptions to the rule. Many fiscal years begin tomorrow; medical residencies, too. And here at Georgetown Law, where I edit the alumni magazine, we meet our new dean today. So this is a beginning, pure and true. But even if it wasn’t, it could be a day to celebrate. I take beginnings wherever I can find them.
Yesterday we had the first big thunderstorm of the season. The sky darkened, lightning flashed, the wind came up. There was that last-minute dash to bring in laundry air-drying on the deck. I can remember rushing to rescue an entire load from the clothesline when I was a kid. Pulling off the pins and tossing them into a bag, then running into the house, my arms full of sun-crisped sheets, just as the first fat drops fell. I had to leave for an appointment yesterday in the middle of the downpour so I missed the mid-storm coziness, being safe in the dark house while sheets of rain sweep the street. The thunderstorm is the central drama of summer. The air afterward so fresh you want to gulp it.
This weekend I held the enemy. A woman I sat next to was reading on her Kindle. Yes, she likes it, she said, but it’s not as light as it looks. She thrust it toward me. I reached out, a little hesitant. If I touched it, what would happen?
Nothing, of course. The kindle was a bit heavier than I thought it would be. But books are heavy, too. It’s not the weight of the thing that bothers me. It’s the mutability. Is it Virginia Woolf or Barbara Kingsolver? Is it a comic book or a cook book or an ancient record book like the ones from Prague Castle pictured above? In books, the ideas get all mixed up with the paper they’re printed on and that’s how they become (for me, at least) almost holy things.