I graduated high school in Palo Alto, California, in 1968, and in the following late September I drove to Independence, Missouri. I did it just for the hell of it at first, but decided to stay. I returned to Palo Alto a couple years later but retreated back to Missouri about the time rents and real estate costs in the Bay Area made it too difficult to live there. (I believe the vast majority of my school mates no longer live in the area, having scattered to more liveable areas around the West Coast. Mostly Oregon, I suspect.)
But in 1968, about the time Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, and my generation were burning their bras and their draft cards and some Americans flew around the moon and most Americans were wondering who shot J.R., hopping in my 1957 Chevrolet "Sedan Delivery" wagon to drive half-way across the country on the already legendary U.S. Route 66 was a great adventure.
I wasn't quite eighteen yet so that was even better. I quit my job at a Texaco gas station on El Camino Real and hit the open road with no particular ETA, no job, and no place to live, in particular. For the rest of my life so far I have never duplicated the feeling of freedom that gave me.
At the time, construction on the new Interstate Highway system had barely begun, so almost all of Route 66 was two-lane blacktop. It went right through the middle of every little town it served, so that one minute you would be cruising along a seemingly endless ribbon of desolate highway, and the next, idling at a stop sign at a four-way intersection flanked by a diner and a hardware store. As the song goes, you might see a flatbed Ford in Winslow, Arizona--though today the Interstate skirts around it so you hardly know you're there.
I was there in 1968, but to be honest I may not have noticed anyway. It was about a two-thousand mile drive from Palo Alto to Kansas City, and it might be more accurate to say it has its exciting moments than to say it has its boring moments. The first half of that journey is desert, once you get out of California's Great Valley and before you reach Albuquerque. One could be forgiven for being less than totally alert the whole way.
For most of my life I thought of this trip as a high point of my life, but in truth, it was just the interstice between two things, my life as a Californian and the rest of my life as a Missourian. It took twelve years after that to figure out what I wanted to do with myself, when I finally got a "real" job and got married and all the rest. I have to say that I'm a slow learner.
Since my wife died about five years ago, I've come to think of those two eras as two lives. Actually, I've always felt that way, a perspective perhaps facilitated by the geographic separation of them. It must be very strange, I'm thinking, to be an adult in the same place you went to Kindergarten. As it is, I feel well insulated from that life that ended with the completion of high school in 1968--well insulated by a buffer of two thousand miles of desert and farmland, connected only by the memory of a thin ribbon of highway that doesn't even exist anymore.
On to life 3.0. So far, so good.
Yeah. I guess i had before-kids life, raising kids life, and now... whatever the hell this is! 🤣
ReplyDeleteI suspect I'm just starting life 4.0.
ReplyDeleteRev 1 - Childhood, youth, college
Rev 2 - Marriage, fatherhood, divorce
Rev 3 - Singleness, polyamory, arts-business partnership, collapse, depression, etc
Rev 4 - Al-Anon, enlightenment, living for myself
Yeah, 4 is still beginning. Takes a few years to transition. And who knows, since Rev 3 was in some ways an extension of Rev 2, I may someday decide they were all Rev 2 and decide I'm only now starting Rev 3. That would make sense.
I want to do a cross-country drive all by myself. Have always wanted to. Can't yet. Maybe someday. That you got to experience Route 66 before the freeways is fantastic.
It would be interesting to see how people divide their lives up--by what criteria would you decide when one phase ends, another begins? I got my first actual good-job-with-a-future in 1980, and got married in 1984. That was the fuzzy beginning of life 2.0. Life 2.0 ended in a slow fade: I retired, my wife passed away 7 years later, my son moved away 2 years after that. Since then, lots of pretty fast changes, hard to make much sense, but some real good things as 3.0 materializes, or comes into focus, or whatever it's doing, if anything.
ReplyDelete