There’s more dead animals than you’d think along the Eisenhower Interstate System.
At one point yesterday, between Erie and Toledo, I thought I was driving along a deer cemetery. Reminded me of of Ginsberg’s great poem, A Supermarket in California. (It’s one of my favorites, and I pretty much share it every semester with my students–California, as well as his straight-forward instructions for Ways to Revise a Poem.)
Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados–babies in the tomators!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?
I think it’s the images of long unfettered aisles, peopled in Ginsberg’s imagination by husbands and babies (in my own memory, a family of four dead deer) that calls up the comparison. Totally disparate things, I know, but maybe it’s the dislocation of road travel that creates these odd juxtapositions. You’re not tethered by the quotidian when you’re on the road: no bills, no garbage day, no arm draped on the refrigerator door, hoping a hot meal will magically spring to life. You’re more prone to free-association when you’re driving. To daydreaming. And to creating patterns and meaning unbound by minutes and hours, or the chatter of others.
I took the photo above on my way out of Ithaca. What’s so surprising to me is not the fact of the roadkill–I am thankful and humbled by the employees of the Ithaca Department of Public Works–it’s just the method of transportation that’s a shocker. Living in Boston, in the concrete heart of it all, you don’t find yourself following dump trucks with dead deer hanging off the back.
N.B.: The Big Boy in the title of this post refers to the 24-hour restaurant connected to my hotel, not a self-anointed nickname.
My overnight in Ann Arbor has multiplied into night two. Got in touch with my cousin Hope (her sisters are named Faith, Charity, and MJ) and we’re gonna brave the elements–zero degree windchill and a relentless blowing snow–to see downtown.
Ann Arbor has the rep of being a bastion of liberalism, so will report back if I’m accosted by all the same-sex couples smooching on Main Street.
Lucy in the navigator seat
Finished up my grades yesterday and set off for Ithaca to visit my nephew, BJ. He’s working at the Ithaca ScienCenter, and his supervisors have given him heaps of responsibility as the Museum Services Coordinator (suckers!). But seriously–BJ seems quite content with his job, and sees his important work as valuable for a business law degree in the future (forget NYU and Columbia, come to Boston College!).
Crossing an old railroad bridge outside Albany
Lucy has been dealing with the road well, only getting excited when we slow down at a rest stop or an intersection (New York rest areas blow Massachusetts’ away).
I listened to the the first half of A.M. Homes’ The Mistress’ Daughter, a beautifully written and at times, disturbing (Homes’ signature style), memoir of her maddening, mysterious relationship with her biological parents (she was adopted at birth). At one point she muses on the sexual tension between fathers and daughters–particularly with her gruff, ex-quarterback of a biological father–and their rendezvous in hotel bars. Also began the first couple chapters of Anderson Cooper’s Dispatches from the Edge–not nearly as literary, but moving for Cooper’s reflections on the suicide of his brother and the wandering path to his career as a journalist.
Today to Ann Arbor to visit my friend P.F. and his new wife, Honor. Hoo-rah!
