We're on our yearly road trip again, but I have yet to write about the last one we did. As usual, Michael is way ahead of me on this, so I'm going to let him start off the vacation chronicles (generous-if-lazy creature that I am). So let's kick off the vacation report from Michael's POV:
Monday a.m.
September 16
Arroyo Grande
We’re at it again. Emily, Ernie and me. It’s day two of the annual trek, a gift trip whose existence must be attributed largely to Covid 19 (albeit the 2020 version) and our late mom, Margaret. Who would have expected them to pair up in such a positive and enduring manner? As she might have quipped, “Who’d a thunk it?”
It’s easy to describe the elderly folk in their final years as “declining” if one adopts a comparative view of life’s continuum. After all, many things simply don’t function as they used to - notably, the mind. Bodies wear down too. Mom was no exception in the fall of that year. I came to view her as a person who was winding down and balancing her biographic accounts in the months leading to her departure. Did she have odd visions of matters not discernibly connected to reality? Of course. Did we any less enjoy talking to or spending time with her? Not at all. Neither in the spirit of pity nor strictly as a matter of compassion. For even in that twilight time of her life she was giving us things no one else had to offer - a deepening view of ourselves from a family perspective - an appreciation.
On the Northwest trip in the fall of that year, during the time of the election I spoke with her quite often - usually in the evening - about our collective journey, hers and mine. I was careful not to offer condescending thanks for all the good things she had done for me. That would have put her off and I knew it. Rather, I mostly asked her to fill in gaps in the family history to which I was not privy, particularly involving her father who had been so important in my life after my own father died when I was quite young. I learned much from our chats. She was capable of remaining mentally crisp for about an hour on those occasions, which fact alone seemed to mean a great deal to her. This I know. They were some of the best moments I ever shared with her.
So here we are in Arroyo Grande. We traveled to Santa Barbara from Arizona yesterday and had lunch with sister Carol, then on to here for the night. We’re headed to the Pinnacles National Park, northeast of Soledad, California. Emily, a serious and trained geology enthusiast, will explain in some detail to me just what I am looking at and I will lose track of this information somewhere along the line. Now if we were talking about wood…………Tonight we’ll stay in Monterey and continue north tomorrow.
So, back to mom and Covid. During the summer of 2020, Em and Ern were preparing to take mom on their annual trip into New Mexico. Art shows, where I exhibit my work, were all closed due to Covid restrictions, and I was known to be available to travel with them. I did. We were sitting in our room at the Thunderbird Motel in Taos one morning when I asked Em and Ern, who had just entered, if they had ever traveled to the Pacific Northwest. Before they could even answer mom blurted out, “When are we going?” None of them had. Off we went in late October and the rest is history. The trips with mom and the presence of Covid had brought us together. The annual trip is now a tradition we cannot miss.
The travel plan is never much more than a sketch, subject to diversions and distractions but always pregnant with experience. We’ll see how this one evolves. We do have a list. We’ll try to do it justice.
