driving at night has always held some inexplicable appeal to me, and it stretches back as least as far as my childhood, when i took day-long excursions to a tiny Kentucky town called Virgie:
leaving Virgiemy great grandmother lived in the same ramshackle house where she raised nearly twenty children during the Great Depression, and all of the surrounding shacks and trailers were populated by kinfolk. my favorite was Uncle Nick, a mechanical genius who invented hydraulic woodsplitters and used to visit us in North Carolina whenever he and my grandmother weren't feuding. Uncle Nick gave me my first Bowie knife and, when employed, worked for the local coal mines that sold off Pike County one bucket at a time:
coal mine in Pike County, Kentuckyacross the footbridge stood the country store where my grandmother first bummed a smoke from my grandfather in 1952. this cigarette led to their marriage three weeks later, a daughter the following year, then a second, then a third. these three daughters gave birth to three grandsons, and this odd symmetry held for twenty years until the birth of grandson number four:
my cousin Luke's first Halloweeni haven't been back to Virgie since my great grandmother died. i was in college at the time, which made for a convenient excuse not to go to the funeral. i remember my grandmother calling and telling me how sad she felt to lose her mother. i didn't know what to say, much less how to say it. mainly i just listened. sometimes i still do.
i don't know why all this came up tonight, but those sleepy car rides back from Virgie seem closer tonight than they have in years...
maybe it's just a clever form of procrastination.
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