The day before Thanksgiving, I was driving my much-cherished tiny commute to work in Brookline and I had one of those odd and intense bursts of sense and memory triggered by association. They happen when you do a thing on the a particular day of the year that you have done on just about the same day in manyyears past. In this case, driving at Thanksgiving time.
Wednesday was one of those grey and wet November days. After the red and gold leaves have fallen, only the faded pale ale of old grasses and reeds, the grey and sliver planes of pond and river, the dark curved stems and thin fingers of leafless trees. An inkbrush world. The holiday itself and the rest of this weekend have been that other kind of November day: pure blue sky and brief afternoon light, fading too quickly, leaving the senses confusedly protesting at being robbed of time.
Now my Thanksgiving week trips this year are brief--to a half day of work in Brookline on the eve of the holiday, to family in Lexington on the day itself, home to Roslindale. But for a long time for me, Thanksgiving was about journeys, sometimes grey and stormy, sometimes in bright chill sunshine, always a holiday framed by time and distance.
There were the years with my then-husband: the years we made it up from Washington, DC to Boston to spend the holiday with my family. He loved driving and hated flying, so we'd get up in the navy blue pre-dawn in Washington, DC, start onto the road at 5 AM to beat the early rush hour. Roll across the Delaware Bridge at sunup with coffee in hand. By the time the sun got bright, we'd be in New Jersey, packed in among vast lines of barreling trucks and the great holiday flood of travellers in mortion. We'd have a packed lunch from the Korean Jewish deli in Adams Morgan, washed down with swallows of whiskey with slow intakes of joint and cigarette for dessert. We didn't do much planning besides jeans and sweaters and having a good stack of cassette tapes. Led Zepplin, Richard Feynman, David Bowie, the Smiths. Sometimes we stopped along the way to have get physical. I can't even remember what it was like, to not be able to go 12 hours without touching and affection. It sounds like a sappy joke.
There were the years after my marriage ended. I flew a couple of times, but the crowds were tense, the airports miserable, the flights unreliable. After 9/11 and about a thousand factors made air travel in the US even more of a burden, I just began to drive by myself. And oddly, weirdly, I loved it.
I fell in love with the solitude. The first leg through Baltimore and on up to the edge of the Chesapeake before I made my first pit stop. The massive urban overload of New York and New Jersey. The quiet wooded stretch of Connecticut, after I left the Turnpike behind and cut across towards Sturbridge and the border of Massachusetts. It was a time of my life when I was often feeling pain, intensely, and anxiety that sometimes bordered on terror. I'd fucked up my life. I was trying to make it right. I didn't know how. So I liked the long road alone. A whole day without phone, email, tv, without others' input. I liked the rest stops. I liked the highway. I liked being alone with ten hours worth of music, with blue skies streaked with white or with low grey skies and rhythmic wipers.
I mean, I wanted to see my family, my old friends. I was committed to it. The reasoning part of my mind knew what reasonable, healthy things I should be doing to hold it together, to be an OK person and daughter and sister and friend. Nobody had to know about my secret affair with driving by myself.
Going back further still, I can just pull up the now-faded mental Polaroids of earlier eras when the journey was a simpler sort of pleasure. Going to college in the Berkshires, coming home for Thanksgiving break via the old Route Two bus route, savoring the brilliant colors and sturdy old towns, simpering with pride over academic marks, simplistically sure of the awesomeness of the Boston to which I was returning, sure (a bit heedlessly sure) of the comforts of home, food, family, hometown friends at the end of the road.
Then there was the earliest Thanksgiving ride of all, when we were little kids. We'd have the big meal at our house, with Mom and Dad and some of the older grandaunts and uncles, then drive in the late afternoon's to the house of Grammy, my mom's mother. For neighborhood kids who'd always lived on the same block, this was a memorable drive; from Roslindale to Malden, we'd travel in our station wagon down Storrow Drive along the Charles River, staring up at the brownstones of the Back Bay, the big office towers of downtown reflected in their glass prince, the Hancock Tower, at the Red Line rattling over the wintery Charles on the pepperpot Longfellow Bridge. Where the graceful Zakim Bridge now soars was a battered tangle of old post-war steel that carried us north over Charlestown and the Mystic River.
At Grammy's we'd meet up with a gaggle of other family for a peaceful bout of hanging around, everyone quietly digesting their dinners, grownups talking politics and life, sipping beer or tea, kids fitting in a bit more dessert and settling in front of The Wizard of Oz, which ran every year on TV that afternoon like some sort of mysterious ritual part of the holiday. It captured both one's deep yearning to believe in a magical, more adventurous land far away from family and parish and home, the fear of what one would discover there, and in the end, the discovery that home was where you wanted to be after all.
On the way back to our house, late in the evening, we kids would sleepily gaze out over the lighted city, watching for the familiar glowing red triangle of the big Citgo sign, growing and shrinking and blinking, the mysterious sigil of our own hometown skyline, comforting us, like all good Bostonians however happy or un-, that we weren't in Kansas.
And now I am home for Thanksgiving--back in the old house, in the old neighborhood, both the same and different. A part of my brain still called out for that long, solitary highway day. But mostly, I'm over it. There was a pretty great pleasure in traveling no further than Lexington, to my brother and his wife and their family. It was good to have little more to do then roll a few miles and arrive warm dishes in hand, and be regaled with a lovely dinner that not only he and his wife, but my nieces and nephews, helped assemble. From grown up college girl and teens baking and shifting furniture and setting a stylish table, to little guy and girl giving a hand with stirring and such. And later, off to a movie at which we all laughed and cried (but NOT the Wizard) and then home to bed. There is something to be said for it. Home.
