Friday, April 12, 2013

Thirsting for The Open Road Again - We Are Children of Our Parents

The open road keeps calling my name. I hear her whisper to me ever so slightly. C'mon she calls, as if it were that easy. 

Spring delivers a predictable bounty of pollen, rain, and a renewed focus on what we'd like to do outside if we had the time. Some would garden, others walk, and yet I can't get my mind off taking a long, endless maybe, drive to somewhere worth a photograph. 

My father's father was, as they say, a car guy. My father is, to say the least, a car guy. My thirst to drive shouldn't be a surprise then, but it is to me. 

I yearn to drive not for the privilege of reaching the destination, but everything else. A moving target is always harder to hit. 

Children appear in my dreams, reaching for my hand, begging for help. The weight of my arm too great to lift high enough to meet their fragile hands. 

My mother's mother was a lover. My mother, somewhere beneath it all, still is. Lest I fall short there, I must be. 

A man that lay under the roof of a stick-built shed more times than not works harder in his life than a king with a thousand castles. We celebrate the king, shun the man, and yet both are liable to not lend a hand, but maybe every so often for posture. Want to do some good in this world? A swim upstream is in order, the air in our lungs ready and willing to be used, our selfish minds telling the muscle to wait indefinitely. 

We can't wait anymore. 

Look through the windowpane of your childhood, and maybe you see the same? 

Forever we are bound to our parents, their wills and ambitions stuck in our DNA like the very soil we stand upon, trying ever so hard to make it alright.