Saturday, November 21, 2009

Slugs in a Sleigh

No matter how you slice it, twelve hours enroute to anywhere is a long ride. We prefer the drive from our house to New Orleans to the drive from our house to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. The topography of eastern Tennessee is much more interesting than the flatlands of Georgia and Alabama, and the hills surrounding Chattanooga are full of hardwoods, now in their last throes of fall.

We typically start this journey with a ride along the Ocoee, but this has been precluded by a rockslide from the hillside to the highway. This decreased the scenic factor and increased the time factor for an already long one-day trip of six hundred miles. Not surprisingly, Richard does have a protocol for our long drives, trading off driving every hundred miles. This keeps us from falling asleep, except for our butts and lower extremities.

Now, my brain is another problem; the slower my body moves the more hyper my brain becomes. After a while of running free, my brain sets up a pinball machine in my head, bouncing random ideas from one synapse to another. In my usual perpetual motion mode, I can guide the brain balls by bumping the body machine every so often. It’s hard to focus when the nearest goal is hundreds of miles and thousands of minutes away. I come up with some of my most exiting adventures this way. By the time we reached our destination, I needed a nap to recuperate from being a slug.

But a nap was not in the cards. Our first stop was to load Elaine’s freezer with food from Mamie’s garden to share at Thanksgiving. Then, it was across Lake Pontchartrain and the Mississippi River to Pat and Will’s house on the far side of New Orleans, where they were taking us to English Turn Golf and Country Club for Friday’s fish feast. I felt strange entering the club at night without a bunch of boxes.

For over ten years, we lived in a neighborhood near English Turn. Pat and I were very involved in volunteer work with an agency that worked to stabilize homeless families, and our major fundraiser was an annual evening auction and dinner held at English Turn. Our long-suffering husbands toted boxes, collected tickets, and listened to endless hours of grief and gossip while we proceeded to spend months of madness and much money to make our auctions a success.

Unbeknown to me, Richard had become enamored of a particular part of the club’s hardwood flooring, and immediately insisted on visiting the exact spot he had so loved. This was the first time we were all together at the club since Katrina. The agency that we had worked so hard for lost its mission in Hurricane Katrina; Richard and I lost our home; and all of New Orleans lost family and friends.

After dinner, we stayed up until midnight talking, but we stayed away from the topic of our losses of home and community. I guess it still hurts too bad.