driving and smiling

Do you remember the feeling of driving at night in the summer, preferably on a highway with the windows down, your hair blowing around your face, the air soft and warm, the radio magically supplying you with one perfect song after another? You might have been 16, or 19, and the person next to you was a boyfriend or girlfriend, or better yet your best friend in the world. You were wild and free, suffused with a tingly happiness, and surely the kindred spirit next to you felt the same. The perfection of that night was motion, being on the way, sliding effortlessly through time and space. Arriving somewhere would have ruined it.

I've arrived here in adulthood. I am in a very definite spot in time and space: 34 years old, on this couch in this house in this town, just a few miles from the Chesapeake Bay, saddled with all sorts of responsibilities the very thought of which would have afflicted my teenage self with a queasiness worse then any case of carsickness.



But listen to this. Yesterday, I drove my two children to a Halloween party on the Eastern Shore and I felt it. That wildness, that happy abandon. Driving over the Bay Bridge in the glorious autumn sunlight, sparkling deep blue water below us, the expansive bright blue sky above us, windows down and Eddie Vedder rumbling away on the radio, I caught sight of the tops of my children's heads in the rear view mirror and I laughed for joy. Gary-the-Monster's orange horns and brown yarn hair and G-Force's sequined eye mask were bouncing to the music in the backseat.

The party was lovely (perhaps a trampoline inspires that same feeling of freedom?), full of children and parents in their Halloween best, and we stayed a long time. On the way home, the car magic returned. We headed straight into a perfect sunset on our way back over the bridge, and again the radio rose to the occasion. Darkness fell, and the moon followed us all along Route 50, past shopping centers and houses, til we made it home. Gabriel said it looked like an apple slice.

It's nice to know that traveling with children one is responsible for doesn't lessen the magic of pop music and the open road. In its own way, a pair of big-eyed, costumed kids dancing in the backseat enhances the magic. Because in the course of a life that is normally divided into drop-off time, lunchtime, play time, bath time, dinner time, and bedtime, it feels so good to have time together that is for absolutely no purpose whatsoever, that is wild and open.

And it's also because I love them so damn much.

Happy Halloween, everyone!