Day 88 & 89: Route 66 to the Hollywood Bowl

for September 10, 2011

I am thankful to have arrived in LA after the road trip! This trip has brought me many truths, some surprising, some painful, and some expected. I was surprised to discover how I am optimistic now. A few times, I got into discussions with folks about how life is tough, the predicament of the world we live in today, and the difficulties facing a younger generation coming up to take the reins. I realized that I have a profoundly different outlook than I used to hold. I'm not sure if some of this comes from living with a laidback Aussie surfer for 3 years, from working hard on gratitude through the Gratitude Project, or quite what - maybe a combination of these things. But I recognize that yes, I face difficulties, but that I am more optimistic than I used to be. Being sad or defeated about the situation will not help me to overcome it, and I have discovered that if you look hard enough for the silver lining, it is always there. And you'll usually have a better time of it if you keep a positive outlook.

On Saturday, I woke up and went for a dip in the Route 66 pool in our hotel, and then we got a bit of a late start but pulled into LA around 3:30p. It felt great! Bruno, who was loose in the car, kept coming up to sniff the air coming through the vents. He was born here - I adopted him when I lived here previously - and he recognized home, too.




When I got to the apartment, Alex and Stephen had left a bouquet of flowers, along with a really sweet card and a great cd, a box of corn flakes, and some milk in the fridge. On the kitchen counter, there were two bowls and spoons. My heart overflowed - it was so kind, and I felt like I was home. I am so profoundly thankful to be here. I am so incredibly grateful that I met Alex on my first day of college, and that we have remained close. He is such a blessing in my life, and I am glad that he has found a wonderful partner in Stephen who appreciates him and cherishes him too. And how lucky am I that these two amazing friends live 10 minutes north of me?


for September 11th, 2011

What a tough day. It is hard to imagine what it would have been like in my second city ten years ago on that horrific day. I am profoundly grateful for my three years in that most incredible of cities. I love New York.

I am also grateful to be here - Maegan and I went to a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, with Neko Case and the National. I was so excited to see two of my favorites playing in one night! And at the Bowl, which is a gorgeous outdoor amphitheater that you can bring picnics and wine into. It was so beautiful to listen to such incredible musicians, outdoors in the Hollywood Hills under the light of the full moon. I felt life slowly entering back into me, with each chord and key I breathed more deeply.

Day 86: Zozobra; Day 87: Painted Desert

Zozobra before his demise, 9/8/2011

Tardy for 9/8/2011


Today I am grateful for the opportunity to burn my gloom. What I learned from the 87th annual burning of the Zozobra in Santa Fe was that gloom, fear, and misery will appear to be big, ugly, and indomitable from a distance. And they will protest fiercely when you decide to burn them, to eliminate them. They will make a huge fuss and it will seem like they will never go away. But we are more powerful than despair, misery and fear; in the end when we decide to get rid of them, we are ultimately more powerful and we can vanquish them.

There is something incredibly cathartic about writing your worries on a slip of paper, putting it in a box with the cares and stresses of 40,000 other people, and then watching a giant effigy with your worry-slips in it go up in flames. Whether it was Zozobra who took my worries or something else, I have banished Old Man Gloom in my heart and I am traveling lighter.

I'll add too that this year's Zozobra experienced a lengthy delay because the winds wouldn't die down enough for the fire department to allow the burning to take place (I guess a 50-foot burning man in a field with 40,000 people is probably a bit dangerous and a tiny liability...). My mom and I kept wondering if Zozobra would burn, or whether we'd be standing out in a chilly field in Santa Fe all night. It was taking forever! And we had changed our trip - stayed an extra night to see Zozobra, specifically - so it would have been a huge shame if we didn't get our gloom burned. And, like everything in this transition has been for me, it couldn't be rushed. I had to be patient, accept things in their own time, and steadfastly believe that things have a way of aligning when they are meant to be. Sure enough, at about 3 minutes past the point when we had said we'd leave, the ceremony began. I think in the end, it started right on time.

(I do have some great video, which I'll post here when I'm not in Kingman, AZ, where the wifi connection is not quite beefy enough to handle all the multimedia I want to share with you!)


For Friday, September 9, 2011
Wow I am grateful that tomorrow is the final day of the road trip. It's been long, and the cats and I are starting to show the strain of travel, exhaustion, and frustration. I am so excited to be in my new space, which is not my car.






I am also grateful for the opportunity to visit Petrified Forest National Park, which includes the Painted Desert and the Petrified Forest. It was a lovely detour, and I constantly am amazed by the desert's beauty. The colors in the painted desert were incredible, and it was great to see this gorgeous place: I found myself thinking of the desert painters I had seen at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu. As for the petrified wood, I had seen small pieces of petrified wood before, but never giant logs that still resembled trees. I'm so glad places like this exist, that they are protected, and that I am lucky enough to visit them. It's a great reminder of a few things: first, these trees that are now petrified wood are 225 million years old. 225 million! And in their lifespans, they have turned from wood into (precious) stone: proof that life works change in us that is completely unanticipated, and can turn the banal into the beautiful - if we but let it.

Day 84 & 85

Tardy posts for September 6 & 7! No internet access in Northern NM!

September 6
I am so grateful to have arrived safely at my grandmother's house in northern NM. As we pulled out of Colorado Springs this morning, the "check engine" light went on in my Subaru so we had to detour to the mechanic. Luckily, it was just an altitude problem, easily fixed by adding some "heat" to my gas. Who knew you could add heat to gas? But now I know you can buy it in any gas station. Seems no one was dealing with the altitude gracefully - Bitty had an episode of kitty heatstroke, the car didn't like it either, and lord knows the rest of us felt a little light-headed. Or maybe that was just being cooped up in the car together for days on end?

This is the view looking toward Santa Fe, off my grandmother's deck for which I am so grateful. I love my grandmother's house, it is an anchor and a sanctuary. I love this place. And I am, as always, profoundly grateful for my sister. There is nothing quite so comfortable and delightful as being able to share a look that's worth 1000 words with someone who knows you so intimately. Some things never change, and my bond with my sister is one of the most important and meaningful bonds of my life.




September 7
Today we trekked out to Ghost Ranch, Georgia O'Keeffe's ranch north of Abiquiu, NM. It was an incredibly inspirational day. I am thankful to have hiked in the gorgeous desert, to have visited the place O'Keeffe called home, and to be walking away inspired by that courageous and revolutionary woman and by the extraordinary desert landscape. I find this part of the world so beautiful. There is something so honest about it. Life and death are stark here; the landscape is simple and uncluttered, stretching on in clear lines as far as the eye can see. It is a place of extremes, where you have to make a choice; the differences are clearly delineated. I find that simplicity and clarity refreshing and beautiful. As we drove south out of Colorado, I felt a force in my chest, pulling me towards this desert. The drive stopped being boring, because I found the view so striking and so beautiful. It is familiar and beloved to my eyes, and I find the desert exotic and unique but also calming. I appreciate any time I have here, because it calms me and gives me peace. I am so grateful for mesas, pinon, green chile, juniper, mountains, and for the sky here that is bigger than the sky anywhere else I've ever been.






And chile ristras, green chiles, there had better be chiles on my dinner, whatever it is. The smell of green chiles roasting was a strangely familiar smell, mixing with the juniper & the pinon...like a half-haunting memory of a life I used to live and can vaguely remember.

Day 83: Colorado

I am grateful to have spent an evening chatting with my dear friend Kim & her awesome husband Ryan!

I am also glad to have made it through 577 miles today. Phew. Tomorrow: NM.

Day 82: Omaha

My apologies for the tardiness of some of these posts. My internet connection has been rather spotty. I have been thinking about gratitude, promise!

Today I am grateful for chance encounters. Like seeing this butterfly stop & sit on the windshield of my car while I was parked, waiting for my parents, at the cat kennel in Omaha.

Another delightful chance encounter has been reading Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Here are some passages that struck a chord with me:

"Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward."

"Departure or imminent death will force you to define your true tastes."

And most importantly:

"Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?" This I believe.

Day 81: Omaha

(tardy post for Saturday, 9/3/2011)

Today I'm so thankful for my sister.

Day 80: Morris, IL, to Omaha, NE

Today I'm grateful to be in a house, not a hotel. We made it from Morris, Illinois, across Iowa to Omaha, Nebraska, where my parents live right now.

This morning I got up and got in the pool. Any day that begins with getting in a body of water, even if manmade, is a good day! The drive was much easier than yesterday's blockbuster 550-mile day. We crossed the Mississippi River - so now we are officially West! There was also less traffic, which I am of course grateful for; I could spend more time taking in the quaint farms, soybean and cornfields, and prairie silos of Iowa.

Cheapest gas: $3.49, Iowa City, IA
Werner truck: spotted, am only!
Best Iowa fashion: Bermuda shorts, T-shirt, no helmet, all-gold motorcycle

Tomorrow my sister comes! Incredibly excited. And happy to be back in Omaha - which is, after all, my birthplace. It seems appropriate to bring up TS Eliot's "Little Gidding," one of the Four Quartets, as it's often on my mind these days:

"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling,
We shall not cease from exploration
and the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."

Day 79: DuBois PA to Morris IL

Instructions for today included: get on I-80 West, pass through Ohio, pass through Indiana, turn right at exit 112 in Illinois...


View Larger Map

Today, I'm grateful that the longest leg of my trip is behind us!

When we woke up this morning in DuBois, PA, the idea had been to go take a quick dip in the pool. Unfortunately it was raining, so instead we hit the exercise room (equipment dating from approximately 1986). Then, I put our suitcases back up in the luggage rack. Very serious business. Good thing I knew where my rainjacket was in my mess of luggage!



We stopped down the road in Brookville, PA, for some breakfast at the Breezeway Cafe. We were the only non-locals, for sure: the breakfast special was $5.50 and the waitress was about as polite as possible. Brookville seems like a really sweet little town, full of patriots (flags!), cute old Northeast buildings, and a farmer's market complete with Amish farmers. I bought homemade elderberry jam from the cafe after having it on my toast.



Favorite road sign leaving PA: "Buckle up - next million miles."

Then we passed through Ohio. We miscalculated, thinking we were making great time - I looked at the map, and we were nearly at the fold, which I thought was the next state border. "Oh look," I cried, "we're nearly to..." (opening map, pause)..."Sandusky!" Sandusky (dead center of Ohio) is not nearly as exciting as the next state line (sorry, Sandusky). But Joliet was just over the Illinois border, so we'd be there in no time...

Then we realized we had forgotten to add in Indiana. The entire state. My mother went to graduate school in Indiana, too! We got a little down when we remembered Indiana.

This is pretty much what it looked like for seven hours today, plus crossing the Allegheny and the Cuyahoga and passing the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery and the College Football Hall of Fame (for real, did not make that one up):



We are definitely out of Bierstadt country and into the cornfields, where the stalks are tall and the vowels are flat. Downside: serving sizes are of the 800-calorie plus variety; upside: people are mindblowingly nice and pleasant (compared to what I'm accustomed to!) But I am enjoying seeing the land change. It is appropriate to me to watch the landscape change, to take this change in myself and this move very slowly, to not be abrupt but to see how things and places and people shift and grow and evolve into very different things and places and people - naturally.

Tomorrow we drive from Morris, IL, across Illinois & Iowa and then arrive in time for my dad to grill us some steaks in Bellevue, NE, and then have two days off the road.

I'm so grateful for my cats behaving well and not puking all over everything (Bruno was recently diagnosed with feline gluttony - true story - a feline version of bulimia, which he does when he is stressed and needs attention); for frequent "sleeper" points that have earned us 2 free nights in hotels; for hotel pools; for my mother's company; for sleep; for being on the road.

Biggest lifesaver so far: Feliway cat pheromone spray. Controlled substance in NYC. Apparently people were using it to get high. Cat pheromone spray. Yes.
State count to date: 6 (NY, NJ, PA, OH, IN, IL)
Truck partner: Werner the blue truck, headquartered in Omaha. Will we see him tomorrow too?

Day 78: Leaving NYC

Today's gratitude is slightly different, because it's gratitude from the road. So it's the usual gratitude post, but I want to include some of the journey that I'm on at the moment. Wait, haven't I already been including you in my journey? Yes, loved ones, but now the physical journey matches the emotional!

Today I'm grateful for things falling into place, even when it's completely chaotic! I got about four hours of sleep last night before getting up to finalize everything before movers arrived at 9am. Then before you know it, it was time to hand Henry back the keys.






I will miss our lovely little Sunset Park apartment. And the view from the living room window: a tree grows in Brooklyn. And it's beautiful, and it was home for a long time.



I will miss New York.



We crossed three state lines today (NY-NJ-PA), the Delaware River, passed the Little League Museum and the highest point on I-80 east of the Mississippi (2250 ft), and drove through the "wilds of PA," which look like a Bierstadt painting and are incredibly idyllic - so bucolic, so peaceful. We got to DuBois, PA, as the sun was setting and managed a quick dip in the pool before it closed at 9p. I'm excited to take a dip in the morning before we hit the road, headed for Ohio. Our goal for tomorrow is Joliet, Illinois.






Today I also came across a quotation from Adrienne Rich, one of my favorite poets:
"No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground - "

Here's to the new force.