Highway To Hell
JAKA -- Jack And Kathryn's Automobile -- is a bulky, black car, fresh-smelling and, when I began writing this post in August, stocked with books. It was a wedding present from my father-in-law-to-be, and the first car I have ever owned. Jack and I have already spilled pumpkin coffee in it. Twice.
A vehicle is freedom. You can just hop in and go, go, go, anywhere -- museums, bookstores, more museums, more bookstores. I'm sure there are other places we go.
Jack has told me not to forget places where we get coffee.
Anyway, instead of opening up a notice from the Museum of Science on an exhibit of Mayan history and closing it back up again, I have a way of turning that moment into one where Jack and I are standing in front of a life-sized replica of a Mayan altar.
I love history. I love the sense of that chasm of time and space between you and a five-thousand-old Egyptian carving, or a Celtic burial tribute, or a Roman road still bearing footsteps after all this time. If you want to know the spirit of legacy, that's it, that's there.
I sometimes think about how old the earth is. What's been buried in the ground. What happened in this precise spot a hundred years ago, a thousand, ten thousand. I've been told that if you go far enough out to space and turn to look back at Earth, through, I can only imagine, the sort of tech that would make TRON jealous, you can still see the dinosaurs. Imagine. Seeing the past.
I had a dream once where I wandered the hanging gardens of Babylon. Some experts don't believe that these ever existed, or, that if they did, they were seriously exaggerated in accounts. I don't care. That dream stuck: wandering around the draped, falling greens and golds, hearing the babble of irrigated water. Have you ever wondered what ancient languages sounded like? We can reconstruct, sure, but wouldn't it be something, to just get in the TARDIS and see, hear, touch for yourself?
Jack and I have gone from Arizona to Michigan, from Massachusetts to Montreal and Ontario, and tomorrow we'll be back in the car, driving home. I've fashioned us with a number of road trip essentials: AC/DC, comfortable shoes, napkins for the glove compartment, a book to read aloud when conversation lulls. Travel has always been difficult for me, but I'm growing to like it.
Time and space and the smell of pumpkin coffee.
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