On The Road with Mom

My mother and I made it safely to HQ, but we've remained on the move.  We've been tackling Ikea and Costco instead of tooling along the interstate, which is a good thing because the interstate can be tiresome.  The first two days were pleasant, in a Holiday Inn Express and Macaroni Grill kind of way.  By the second night, though, I had had it with mall food.  We were spending the night in a little town called Abingdon, Virginia where we found The Peppermill.  They had a decent white wine from Spain and speckled trout.  All was right with the world.

The Peppermill

The next morning, we set out with the intent of leaving the highway to take the scenic route through Virginia on a road called the Blue Ridge Parkway.

That there is a stock photo from the internet.  The closest we got to the scenic route was Total Car Care near Christiantown, Virginia.  I can't remember if there were any massive crosses springing up from the hills around Christiantown.  I just remember it was near the exit to Virginia Tech - but there are a shit ton of giant crosses on the hills of Tennessee and Virginia.  I can see why Doctor Monkey  has become a militant atheist.  Unfortunately, Doctor Monkey was seeing doctors all day on Thursday, or Mother and I might have visited with him and had dinner in northwest Tennessee which would have altered the entire trajectory of our trip.  Doctor Monkey VonMonkerstien is an artist and improvisational comedian in cranky pants who can alter any trajectory and very likely the space-time continuum too. The Total Car Care experience might have been avoided by his famously good cooking.

Here's Total Car Care:

And their back lot:

We wound up there because the Check Engine light came on for no good reason.  Subaru Foresters have a notoriously idiosyncratic gas cap.  If the gas cap isn't on just right, the car doesn't like it and zaps the Check Engine light.  If I were a more suspicious type, I'd think the car manufacturers and mechanics conspired to make sixty bucks every now and then by running a computer diagnostic and hitting the reset button.

As it happened, Mother has been driving this very same Subaru for something like eight years and never once had an issue with the gas cap.  I, on the other hand, knew all about the gas cap quirk because when Velvet and I still lived in the old HQ on Central Park West, the building had a cheap parking lot and I had my brother's hand-m-down Subie.  My sister has it now because we keep Subies in the family.  I've driven for weeks with the Check Engine light on because I knew the sensor was just fucked up.  

Mother has had more significant automotive difficulties than I have - most memorably a VW Dasher with an accelerator that had such pronounced tendencies to stick that she decided the best way to get the dang car to stop was to drive it through the dealership window.  Fortunately, it never came to that but when she and Dad went to trade it for an Oldsmobile, the dealer told them it was eaiser to get rid of the clap than a Dasher.  Between that car and the one that stalled out on the freeway in Houston because the mechanics who were changing the oil forgot to put in any new oil - Mother's not taking any chances with an engine light. We pulled off the highway into the parking lot of a handy elementary school and called my father.  Then we called Triple A.  

The friendly, efficient fellows at Total Car Care would have been happy to send out a tow truck in 45 minutes, but since they were within spitting distance, I convinced Mother to brave the drive to the garage. They worked us into their busy schedule and got us back on the road in an hour and a half.   Mother was a little rattled, though.  It's unsettling to have something go wrong with your car when you're in the middle of NoFuckingWhere and you know with absolute certainty that you've used every single one of your mechanical skills by raising the hood of the car.

We agreed that it was best to stick the main road until she was satisfied that all was well with her trusty Forester, but we'd gone over a hundred miles before we relaxed back into our groove.  Once we both confessed that we fucking hated Virginia, our sense of humor was restored.  In the nick of time, as it turned out since the best restaurant around for miles was this Denny's:

Mother ordered coffee with milk and the young waitress brought her this:

You could see the Blue Ridge Mountains from the parking lot, though, proving we sometimes find little compensations in life.

Dad flies in tonight, and he and Mother will be heading back to Texas on Sunday morning.  Tomorrow is Velvet's 22nd birthday, so Dad is stopping by one of our favorite barbecue joints before he gets on the plane to bring Velvet a pecan pie.

Goode Company Barbeque often says, "You might give some serious thought to thanking your lucky stars that you're in Texas."  I'm thanking my lucky stars I'm in New York City, but Velvet and I do like that pie.

I'm also thanking my lucky stars for my mom.  Looking at the main road and the scenic route as a metaphor, I can see that my mother prefers her journeys to follow a more predictable path.  She likes to have a clear idea of what to expect going forward, even if it's Denny's and the Holiday Inn Express (which for the record was a good value and reliably clean).  Mom likes good values that are reliably clean.  I do too, for that matter, but I'll take the road less traveled almost any time.

The Blue Ridge Parkway doesn't count as a road less traveled, however.  It's a country highway that is well maintained for tourists. The speed limit is 35 mph once you hit Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Forest, so it would have taken us all damn day to get the hell out of Virginia, which may be filled with nice people but struck me as a hillbilly haven - and I'm counting those destructive, manipulative warmongers at the CIA in Langley as redneck hillbilly bastards.  They may be more sophisticated than the folks raising gigantic crosses on every clear cut hill they can find, but from where I sit, the CIA acts kind of like those bad boys in Deliverance.   I've never seen Deliverance myself because just hearing about it back in high school was alarming enough - but I believe it's a lot like the scene in Pulp Fiction where Bruce Willis and some other guy have been held captive by pervs who shoved ball gags in their mouths before committing acts so unspeakable even Quentin Tarantino shied away from splashing it across the screen.

I suppose you never know when you're going to run into pervs with ball gags.  Mother's worries tend to be more garden variety, but there was enough unpleasant unpredictability in her early life that I fully get why she prefers the main road.  She likes to make sure her family is safe, comfortable and well-fed too. 

Yesterday, April 3rd, was my 17th anniversary of getting out of the looney bin.  I continue to celebrate the fact they let me out after a couple of weeks because the doctors didn't have to.  My insurance company would have covered a whole month.  When you considered how many people - most of us, I'm betting - struggle with feelings of abandonment our whole lives, I'm really glad to have parents who not only supported me through thick and thin but also go out of their way to bring pie.

That must be Thing of Beauty #067-101 (Explore Beauty from realia)

Blessed Be