See the USA with Wheels on the Ground

What a pleasure it is traveling this way. "See the USA in your Chevrolet" went Dinah Shore's jingle when I was a kid. I do my driving these days in a fine German automobile with understated styling, a six cylinder Volkswagen Passat, built for the Autobahn with a beat up, fiber-glass chair topper on the top.

Long hours at the wheel may be tiring but do not hurt the way even a short hop by airplane does.

Transferring from my wheelchair to one of the back breaking, butt bruising aisle chairs hurts; getting schlepped onto a plane, indignity aside, is a major pain in the posterior.

I've been through the drill a hundred times, give or take. I know how to do it - I have above average communication, facilitation and negotiation skills. I am not intimidated by authoritarian personalities nor is Judy. She knows how to play blocking back when she needs to.  "Keep your hands off my husband," she yells when a well intentioned "helper" reaches for my arm while I'm in mid-transfer.

It's so much more fun and so much safer flying with my beloved. But still,  I carry a pain pill or two in my shirt pocket as the planes that fly out of Bradley Field get smaller and the seat cushions thinner.

I never once gave up the wheel on the drive down here. And for the first time in years the thought came to me that I might just have one more long-haul, cross-country road trip in me.

On the Road Again

We had a Super Bowl feast on Sunday; the snow was piled so high around our driveway there was barely room for cars. Walls of the white stuff stacked so high and deep that a plow got wedged in a snow bank a week ago today. The embarrassed driver had to call in a Bob-Cat for a tow. 

It’s been that kind of a winter. Haven’t seen anything like it since 1996 when 22 storms blew through the valley.   

So Judy and I packed up and made our escape today. We’ll be driving down the coast to Hilton Head and back over the next few weeks. We’re in National Harbor – until recently Oxon Hill – Maryland, in a Wyndham time-share across the Potomac from the District of Columbia.  A year ago we were here on the day the health care round-table the President convened with the House and Senate leadership was televised. It was not a proud day for our democracy.  And when it was over the punditry pronounced health care reform dead. 

Three weeks later, on our route north, we got back on the day the President signed the House version of the legislative rabbit he had pulled out of the hat. Thought it seemed a scrawny beast to progressives like us who were holding out for a single payer system, we went up to Capitol Hill to join in the tempered jubilation.

Our senior Senator John Kerry’s Office was abuzz with animated conversations in every corner.  In a spirit of non-partisanship we went up to Scott Brown’s office. The pick-up driving Republican moderate had defeated Martha Coakley – a fine Attorney General but an undisputed stick of a campaigner – to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat . . . a harbinger of mid-term electoral disaster for Democrats.

So here we are again, looking across the river to the Nation’s Capitol. It has been a year of Through-the-Looking- Glass political twists and reversals. The Republicans now holding the House with promises of born-again fiscal conservatism are early favorites to win the Senate back in two years.

But the President has been a come-back kid with unprecedented legislative victories during the usually moribund lame-duck session; a White House Staff restructured to win the upper Mid-Western state’s that will decide the fate of his second term; a stunning performance of leadership in the aftermath of the massacre in Tucson; a stunningly boring State of the Union Address, strategically aimed at winning back soporific centrists; and the patience of Job forbearance to sit through fifteen minutes of Bill O’Reilly’s guff without losing his cool.

A few hours ago, Judy and I were on Route 95 in Delaware in moderate traffic when a shiny new SUV passed on our right. The passenger window rolled down, a hand reached out, the thumb twisted down and bobbed three times for emphasis.

No doubt about it, it was meant for us. But why? 

Then we remembered the faded Obama – Biden sticker on our bumper! 

Another Turn at the Wheel

For the past 10 days with help from family and friends who know much more than I about this expanding digital universe we all inhabit, I've been launching a website that I call, Another Turn Of the Wheel. It is not a new site but a redesigned version of one I started a few years ago to assuage my sense of inadequacy at never having produced a book I rashly promised years ago.

The name of the site comes from a passage in Nikos Kazantzakis’ Last Temptation of Christ. The temptation as Kazantzakis conceived it was that Christ in agony on the Cross realizes that he has connections in the highest of places, as the Son he has a get-out-of-jail-free card.

And in his imagination, he plays that card. A reprieve is granted, he is brought down and his wounds are tended to, he heals and goes off to enjoy the life others enjoy. He makes love with Mary Magdalene, and when she is stoned to death soon after, he understands that in the eyes of the community she is after all a fallen woman. He marries two sisters also named Mary and has a brood of children. He lives the contented life of a carpenter until one day his old band of disciples come by and to his great surprise they are led by the prophet Thomas.

Kazantzakis had portrayed Thomas not as doubting Thomas but as sly Thomas, Thomas the shrewd.

So Christ and Thomas go off for a walk and when they stop to talk Christ voices his surprise. “You, Thomas? Who would have thought you would be the one?” And Thomas replies, “Yes but, you see, I learned the secret of prophecy . . . When others hope, I despair, when others despair I hope: the Wheel Turns!”

I just wanted to make it clear that the Wheel that I will be writing about is not just a physical wheel, though I am well served by the ones I ride on.

So we can all be prophets as long as we don’t get swell headed about it. We can prophesize the coming of the spring and better days ahead, and we can tell each other stories we treasure of times and people and place we remember.