We just got back from a week-long road trip. First to Louisiana to see an uncle and cousins, the over to Dothan, Alabama, to see my dads’s twin brother. I hadn’t seen that brother in 16 years. Last saw him at my dad’s funeral. A lot has happened in those 16 years to keep everyone busy, but that’s still way too long to go without seeing someone. From my observation I’d say he’s in the early stages of dementia right now. Not too bad, but I’ve seen this before and I think I know what is coming.
It’s weird the things you think about as you get older and the previous generations are almost all gone. A lot of wishful thinking. Being there with my uncle and my two cousins, I couldn’t help but think that my grandmother would be very happy that we were all together, even for a short time. I would love to believe that my dad somehow knows I went to see his brother.
It sucks that families are so spread out. Maybe it was better when people didn’t move far from home and continued to live, suffocated (haha), in small communities where there is some continuity of life and sense of connectedness. Sitting here in the Dallas area, with my parent both dead, my wife and I have no family life at all here. We have each other. We have friends. This is where our life is, but for me there is a sense of aloneness now that my parents are gone.
I’d not been to Alabama since I was about 13 or 14, when we drove from Dallas to Florida on vacation. Beautiful land. I found the people there welcoming. On the way home we went through Selma, where we drove over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where cops beat the shit out of civil rights marchers in 1965. A good reminder of who the law actually works for.
Honestly, between Dallas and Dothan there isn’t really a lot to see along the I-20 route.
The trip made me appreciate Texas’s own Buc-ees, where you can stop and refuel, get a breakfast taco at any time of the day and some reasonably good coffee, and use a restroom clean enough to eat in. Traveling on a lot of roads most restrooms look like recent murder scenes. I always wonder how the employees can even stand to use them. They have to use them too, right?
Yeah, this is kind of a rambling post.
We rented a Ford Expedition for the trip. Our own cars would be considered small-ish SUVs. Mazda CX-5s. The Expedition was really nice on the road. While it didn’t get very good gas milage, the massive tank allowed to go nearly 600 miles on one tank of gas. The seats were wide and comfortable. I wouldn’t want to own one. They are expensive, too big to really fit in our garage, and the insurance on one would be a lot more than I want to pay, but as a rental for vacation I liked it a lot.
It was good to get out of town for a few days and see my family. It is now Sunday, and I still have Monday and Tuesday off to chill and get refreshed.
