Off We Go!

The day began a bit inauspiciously.

After a week of broken sleep due to worry about preparing for this trip across country, Sunday night found me sleeping like a drugged log. Instead of waking at 4am the way I always do to fret about the day to come, I didn't wake until close to six. Bernie claims he tried to wake me earlier, but he didn't seem too inclined to get up himself and rattle noisily about the room.

So we got a late start.

I had no idea there was still so much snow in the Sierras. Living in the Central Valley, I don't see snow except in pictures, so I was amazed at the sight, as though I was looking at exotic animals in a zoo.

Indeed, with the exception of a couple hours' stretch outside of Reno, Nevada, I was astounded to see snow on mountains all the way to Wyoming.

Compared to the last time we took this route (three years ago), Nevada was amazingly green, and decorated with pink and yellow and red wildflowers here and there. Far from the barren desert I remembered, Nevada was beautiful.
On the eastern side of Nevada, and in Utah, we saw lovely orange wildflowers. Not surprisingly, at the rest stops, there were no flowers. People have a difficult time leaving beautiful wildflowers alone for others to enjoy. However, Bernie The Ever-Indulgent took a few exit ramps until he found some of the lovely blooms for me to get close enough to. I wasn't able to identify them, but now I have a reference photo!

By the time we got to the Nevada-Utah border, I knew we were about an hour and a half behind where we should have been, and I was getting very tired. We missed the lunch-meal turnoff, and had no more opportunity to stop for food until Salt Lake City. At that point, we decided to stop in Evanston, Wyoming instead of pushing on to Green River. A rain storm was catching up with us, which would have just slowed us up even more.

Besides, there was the God, I'm Tired thing hitting us both. Howie was also sitting up and panting on our necks as though he'd had enough road vibration himself.

Thinking ahead to the next phase of the journey, I knew we had to be realistic. We'd hoped to reach Des Moines, Iowa by tomorrow night, but it would have been about a 16-hour drive, and we would have arrived stinking and exhausted sometime after 9pm.

Maybe I'm getting old. Tonight I'm so tired that my shoulders hurt. I felt better about making the decision to stop in Nebraska tomorrow, when shortly afterwards, the rain was shot through by sun, and a vibrant rainbow appeared over Evanston, Wyoming.

Here we are, and tomorrow, Wyoming, and then some.

Wish It Were Different

About a year and a half ago, or maybe it was a hundred years -- it seems like that some days -- I left the house to walk in the early morning, trying desperately to shed the pain I felt after talking to my mother on the phone.

She hadn't yet been diagnosed as having Alzheimer's disease, but I knew that something bad was happening to her. A few months before, I'd made a commitment to call her on the phone every day to keep tabs on her. With each passing day she vomited into my ear such bitterness and hateful memories that I would come away from each encounter shaking, feeling battered to the heart. I heard things about her life that I should never have been told; I would rather have gone to my grave without knowing the secret feelings she harbored.

Anyway, on that morning, a hundred years ago, I walked and walked, and cried, and prayed, because there was just nothing else I could do. After a while I turned to head home, and there in the sky was a rainbow, which the Bible tells us is God's promise to never again destroy the world in a flood. I really felt that the rainbow, for me, was a promise from God that eventually, everything would turn out all right.

I remember that rainbow every day, just about.

I remembered it last night when I got a call from the Pennsylvania State Police, asking me to please call my mother and "reassure" her. She'd called 9-1-1 to complain that she couldn't get her caregiver to leave the house. I explained to the trooper that she has Alzheimer's and doesn't understand that she must have 24-hour care. He was understanding, but I could imagine him rolling his eyes at the ceiling in exasperation.

So I called Mom's house, and she answered the phone, even though it was after 11pm her time, and she should have been in bed. I tried to "reassure" her, and she reacted just as I knew she would, with invective and curses, threats to cut me out of her will, loud and angry demands to be given a competency exam, and just plain old mean ass shit-talk. Nothing I could say made any difference in her anger. Finally I just gave up, and as she shouted, just said over and over again, "I love you, Mom," hoping that somewhere in that ravaged mind the woman I admired so when I was growing up would hear my words.

She hung up on me in her fury, and after a few minutes I called back and asked to speak to her caregiver, which she let me do, to my surprise. I had a long chat with the caregiver, a pleasant chat; the woman is surely earning a place in heaven putting up with this aggressive, nasty stage of Alzheimer's.

I'm trying to keep the rainbow foremost in my mind.