Driving Dad Crazy

Guess what, guess what. Ok, maybe you can't. Red light, green light, 1, 2, 3, no lights in Lexington... I'm learning to drive. And I'm doing it. On real roads. Well, upstate roads. But not just bumpy back country parking lots anymore. No more dirt driving little byways alone. I'm driving. Like a real human being. A capable one. I won't be just one of those academics whose only contact with the real world is when they stub their toe on a bookcase, who can't be bothered with steering a car around the same mundane bend for steering of a thought over the edge and who don't learn to drive till they're 40. I'll show practical skill. Finally appreciative of the allure of cars, I want to own every curve. I am high above pedestrians and dogs. I fly by joggers, imitations of my morning running slow self gone in a blink. With blinkers, I signal. I stop and slow at the one blinking light for miles. I accelerate up hills. I cut through mountains. I take turns too fast and brake too sharp almost breaking my dad's infinite calm. Cars pass me. And I tailgate the violent tail lights of the sunsetting sky. In upstate New York, still unable to do something as simple as ride a bike, this is my first taste of independent mobility. I am as mature as the local 16 year olds. Shocked at my own power over the world. I gobble highway and close in on clouds and am close to forgetting who is in control. I am so well acquainted with being a passenger. With being driven by the dad, mom, car. I have been driven on these roads to riding lessons and libraries. I have listened to songs and read Jane Austen. Now I read speed and deer next 17 miles and watch out, children at play signs. No more helping hands or verbs. I hold the wheel. I drive. As long as licensed driver Dad can stand it. And I swear, well, I swerve from saying that the white hairs have anything to do with my driving.

Jesse's just home made ice cream. Ready, set, go. Pedal to the floor for the chocolate.

The groom wore sneakers.

The bride wore jean shorts. Where else but Woodstock would Crazy Cousin Bruce be married to Mavi by a stream and a Justice of the Peace? We drove down to the wedding from Lexington worried we were only wearing country clothes. But the only suit Bruce sported was jeans and jean jacket to my Windows of the World Bat Mitzvah. I don't think he bothered about coming to Temple. He didn't bother about Temple for his own wedding. Bruce and Mavi were married in the church of nature with trees for cathedrals and a Jewish Justice of the Peace who emmigrated to we've got Wooden hippies in stock from Brooklyn and who would have almost pleased Bruce's son of a rabbi father to know was officiating.

Bruce, 63, a confirmed bachelor who only recently gave up the pipe he'd started smoking when he was a junior at Horace Mann High School, told us two weeks ago that he was getting married to Mavi, a few decades shy of 63. Would we come? Incredulous, we accepted. It was an event more surprising in the occurance than not.

Jesse was the best man. I was the best woman. There were more cameras than guests. While I'd been expecting more of a wedding party, this made perfect sense. Bruce is a photographer. Bruce is a misanthrope. An Arnolphe, he takes fantastic pictures and more pleasure from shocking people than their presence. The wedding taking place as planned was shocking enough. Most of Mavi's family is in the Phillipines and his parents couldn't come from California. They were worried she was marrying him for his money; we were worried she wasn't. She is poet, nurse, wit. He is lucky.

So after casually signing the papers, without choreography we clumsily tripped down to the bank of the river. With socks up to his calves, a camera down around his neck, a baseball cap up on his bald head, and a bride years younger, Bruce could have been a most comic groom. Yet amidst the ceremony distinguished by lack of ceremony, with bearded Bruce occasionnally interjecting in the remarks of Justice and frowning through the Browning, when he put the ring on her finger and she on his ringfinger it was magical. Wedding, we're going to spend the rest of our however long lives together magical. Watching while they watched eachother, my family gathered closer. Their exchange of bands, symbols of unbound bonding and an official family made me happy I was a part, came from and out of one. The only other wedding I've been to was traditional Vietnamese in a Buddhist Temple and a language I don't understand. And in the middle of that ornate, old tradition, there was also the simple promise of eternity and transcendence through trying to merge into one. Eventually I am going to a normal wedding, although that's unlikely for a long time with my family. Anyways, I hope the beauty of the form forgives and holds the relatively strange content of my relations always.

We're on vacation,

Mom says when she offers formerly forbidden soda, ice cream or allows Jesse to buy Magic cards casting spells on a Forbidden Planet. We're on vacation is an excuse for the extraordinary, but I slip on the habit of Lexington, and it cloaks me in living at home conditionning completely. Wasting days away in the hammock, river gazing, reading, and running absorb hours until the day is dried up, my eyes are dry, and I am dripping sleepiness. I've stopped building sand slides at swimming hole but sleepy sand overcomes me at an hour one never dreams during college. Going to the movies in Downtown Windham (there is no uptown or midtown) in a baggy sweatshirt, I could be 12. After the terror of returning to turning thirteen passes, it is relaxing, so little responsibility, and I like routines.

It is Sunday morning. It will be Macneice's and Stevens' Sunday Morning till dinner time. After a run I read the Sunday Times on a porch overlooking a river and its own eventual demise. China and Africa meet in trade, resevoirs are folded and hung up to dry in Cuba, thousands are killed in Sudan. Hand to hand combat so close you can smell the enemy is so far from this river valley where the worst you can imagine is the river jumping over the mountain and carrying the porch away. And even that seems unlikely as river's sky blue is lying low and in between banks safely in August.