Saturday, November 09, 2002

Not Even a Post Card!

Shall I begin by confessing my shame? I did not write. No journaling, no diaries, no epic letters. I didn't record detailed accounts of each day's journey, or seek out cyber cafes, for the purpose of Blogging. Certainly I was very busy as we made our way through 14 states, but the sad truth is that I didn't write because I was too lazy to use a pen!

This is a profound and sort of disturbing revelation. I attended a Big school, as a double major with two minors, and I hand wrote most of my papers. I owned a temperamental typewriter, but no computer. Geoff used to tease me, because he thought I might be the only person to spell out C-a-l-i-f-o-r-n-i-a on envelopes. I had a writer's callous that bled by the end of finals. And I stubbornly resisted learning to use a machine to record my words.

But no more. Every night I thought of the scenery and people, the curious sights, the humorous occurrences, and I ached to write...sort of. What I actually ached for was a key board and spell check, plenty of memory in my mother board and a DSL modem. More power. Delete. Return. Save.

Some of you may be getting a post card, and occasionally I scrawled a few notes on a scrap of paper. Tragically I did not fulfill my fantasy of writing a publishable account of a family, traveling the scenic byways of North America, with their cat and their dreams. It was meant to reveal deep truths about our society and the intangible essence of endless prairies, majestic mountains and rural roads. People would be touched by heart warming accounts of all the cute things Max said, or by the fascinating details of how many miles we traveled each day and what kind of gas mileage we got. It would have been a book to travel by, for future generations; families would read it and feel compelled to travel off season, through bad weather, and stop at such memorable places as The Jolly Green Giant, in Blue Mounds, Minnesota.

Fortunately I do remember some things; like Sophie's swim meet, the bald eagle that flew in front of our vehicle and hovered in front of us, and the dinner I concocted when we were snowed in in the wilderness of South Dakota (we called it "Custer's Surprise.") As soon as I get some laundry going, check messages and visit the hens, I hope to sit down and write about our family vacation, using this wonderful computer and the notes I scribbled on the back of a Piggly Wiggly receipt.