The Drive

I do believe this is the first time in my long life I’ve ever driven 1,700 miles in two days with one day of rest in between. What an experience. Sort of mind numbing along with numbing other body parts. Luckily, I had my brother with me to share the driving responsibilities as we made our way from Johnson City, Texas to Jefferson City, Missouri and on to Columbia where we watched my grandson graduate college on the day in between the big drives.

We were going to make it a golf vacation, but my brother had surgery on his arm and couldn’t swing a club, so we shortened up the trip. It will be the last time. We still want to do the golf vacation and we looked at courses all along the route as we drove and plotted out where we might like to go. That did give us some fun, plus the scenery was nice and the weather was nice, and relatively speaking the driving was easy. We hit one big traffic jam in Waco on our way back where we sat very patiently in our car with about a million 18-wheelers as we inched our way along.

Back to the graduation. It was splendid. The grandson made it through in four years, with a two-year pandemic thrown in for good measure, with a degree in journalism and a job that he landed prior to graduation. I’d say that was good work. He seems happy with his accomplishments, as he should be, and it’s nice to see a boy who once slept at the foot of our bed on the floor in a tent do such grand things. The only burr in the ointment is the one that will be there for me for every family achievement going forward, the missing wife, mother, and grandmother who died in 2020. But that’s just a burden to bear and I plan on doing it with as much grace and dignity as possible because it seems a nice way to serve her memory.

John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale