Moving On -- However Slowly

Gary, Indiana. As I write, I am inside the Schneider Operating Center (OC) in Gary, Indiana, just south of Chicago. This is the largest Schneider facility in the country, and I am inside trying to stay as much as possible out of the heat and avoid idling my truck to stay cool.

Dallas. Last time I wrote, I was on my way to Dallas to spend a couple of days with my family there – no ties of blood, but ties of the heart just as strong. I had an enjoyable visit, even though, just as any time I go to visit people anywhere, there is never enough time and I don't get to see everyone I would have wanted.

My Daddy didn't get to Dallas on that Sunday afternoon as he'd thought – he found out at the airport in Florida that his flight had been canceled, so he had to take one the next day. I thought I'd missed my chance to see him since I was leaving on Monday morning, but the load I finally got out of Dallas didn't deliver until Wednesday morning in Albuquerque, New Mexico, so I had time to wait on my Daddy's arrival..

I picked up the load on Monday afternoon, and then parked at a truck stop in Fort Worth, from where I would leave Tuesday morning. That let me see my Daddy on Monday evening when he got to Dallas, and we had a very nice visit. The last time I saw him was when he was working in Phoenix last year, and Terry and I passed through on our way to California.

Everything I could say about my Daddy was pretty much said in the entry I wrote about him last year on Father's Day, titled simply “The Hero.” Just click on the link if you want to read about him.

West to Albuquerque. From Fort Worth, I got to drive on one of my favorite roads in the country, US 287, up to Amarillo (I also love the drive on 287 north from Amarillo into Colorado and up into Wyoming), and then west on I-40 to Albuquerque. I made it as far as Santa Rosa, New Mexico, on Tuesday, and delivered my load before dawn on Wednesday morning.

Back to Texas – Laredo – then north. I got my next load assignment Wednesday morning, to drive down to Santa Teresa, New Mexico (just west of El Paso), to pick up a load going to Laredo. Once again, I would get to take one of my favorite drives down US 90, US 277, and US 83, from Van Horn, Texas, to Laredo.

But, I couldn't pick up the load in Santa Teresa (only 260 miles from where I was) until Thursday afternoon. That put me in Laredo on Friday afternoon, and also meant that last week, I only netted about 1500 miles total. If you consider that it's easy to put in 500 miles in one day, that equates to 3 days of driving in a week. I drove a little every day, but days like Wednesday and Thursday, I only drove 200 or 250 miles.

But a short week on miles is made less discouraging by being out west and in Texas. That's better than 1500 miles in one week in someplace like New Jersey. So I won't holler too loudly.

Saturday morning, I picked up a load that I took up to Addison, Illinois, west of Chicago, and it delivered today. That meant that Saturday night, I got to go through Dallas, and I got to visit some more.

Today. I will recount my day today as an example of how quickly a day can be twittered away out here on the road. Last night, I had received my next load assignment – I was to come down to Gary when I delivered in Addison this morning (about 50 miles), pick up a loaded trailer and take it another 50 miles to Romeoville, Illinois.

After I delivered the load this morning, on my way to Gary, I got a message indicating that I'd been taken off that short load and was being assigned another load. So when I got to Gary and was waiting on my next load, I took a shower and got some lunch.

The next load was picking up today in Griffith, Indiana, only about 10 miles away, and delivering up near Minneapolis – next Monday! About 450 miles away. I called my dispatcher and she agreed that it wouldn't be a very good idea to leave me under that 450 mile load for 6 days. So I was to pick it up and drop it in Gary, and another driver would pick it up over the weekend and take it to Minneapolis.

So I go to pick up the load. But, the way Schneider told me to go (they send turn-by-turn directions to the places we have to go over the satellite) suddenly had me on a road that big trucks weren't supposed to be on. And the sign was posted in a place that by the time I saw it, there was no place to turn around. So I had to keep going. No problems but only because I wasn't stopped.

Anyway, I got to the shipper, went inside, and when I told them I was there to pick up a load going to Minnesota, the guy in the warehouse said, with some good Chicagoland cursing, that they weren't expecting any trucks until Friday to pick up this load. He called the broker who had arranged the load with Schneider, and then started loading the truck.

He was only one pallet shy of finishing the load when he got a phone call. Things had changed, and he was going to unload my truck – they had rescheduled the pickup for Friday as he had originally thought.

So it was that, after about 3 hours, he had loaded me, unloaded me, and I went back to the Gary OC a different way than I had come – this time on roads I was allowed on – and I still had my empty trailer and nowhere to go. It was late by then, and I didn't want to fight through Chicagoland rush hour traffic and be stuck somewhere without a place to park tonight, so I told Schneider I'd be available in the morning.

As things stand now, I will pick up a load in Batavia, Illinois, in the morning at 10:00 that is going to Prince George, Virginia. Again, it's a situation where the load can't deliver until Monday of next week, so I will drop the load on the way, probably Indy.

“ So it goes.” (My favorite expression from Kurt Vonnegut's excellent Slaughterhouse Five .)

Moving on. I learned last week that my ex-wife, Charlotte (about whom I've written much in this blog in the last two years), is involved in a relationship with someone on a more-than-casual level. It's a friend of her brother's.

I always knew that one day that news would probably come. For the past couple of years, I have thought that when it came I would find myself able to be happy for her and thankful that she's moved on with her life in that direction. It is true, however, that you can think you know what you will do in a given situation, but until the moment comes, it is an untested idea.

When the moment did come for me to know, and I explored my reactions and feelings about it, I found only what I had hoped – joy and gladness for her. And no sadness or regret for me.

It helps me to feel positive about this news because the other person happens to be a friend of Charlotte's brother, Mike. I don't know the man (though I have known of him through Mike for years), but I know Mike. The fact that he is Mike's good friend of many years is an endorsement for me of my hopes that when Charlotte did take that step (wherever it leads), she would have found a good man. The likelihood is that if this man is a friend of Mike's, he is as good a man as could be found anywhere.

I have thought for some time that I had long ago moved on with my life, whatever that means. But this news of Charlotte moving on with hers in this way has pleasantly confirmed it for me.

There is a side of being on the road, living on the road as I do, alone, in solitude (except for those great months with Terry) in which all of my thoughts about who I am, especially in relation to other people, have to be suspect. There is a thought sometimes that being out here all alone for months at a time is in some sense an incubation from the entanglements involved in relating personally to others.

The first couple of years after I started driving a truck, after my divorce from Charlotte, there was a true aspect of my solitude which involved some sense of withdrawal and escape. It was easier for me to grieve and work through all the other issues of my life which had been torn asunder and needed to be put back together alone in the truck – though, doubtless, in some respects, and especially at certain times in those early days, it was much more difficult on some levels.

Then, when the shreds of my former life had resurrected into a new one, things were okay. I began to feel the sense of contentment, gratitude and joy in living that I have expressed many times in this blog. That included the feeling – the conviction – that I had moved on in positive ways, including where my relationship with Charlotte was concerned. I felt like I could look back with joy and gratitude on our life together – without the regrets. I wrote some about those ideas last February in an entry called “ Four Years Later.”

In learning that Charlotte has moved on in this part of her life, I found that, as I thought, I have moved on as well. I'm happy for both of us.

In writing this section, my computer locked up (a rare thing for a Linux system), and while I was waiting on it to right itself, I opened the book I'm currently reading: Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon. Written back in 1982, it details the journey around the United States of a man whose own marriage has just ended. On page 355 of the Fawcett Crest paperback edition I have, I read these words, which are so appropriate to my thoughts here, and are a good way to end this part of our travels together here:

I lost myself to the monotonous rhythm and darkness as past and present fused and dim things came and went in a staccato of moments separated by miles of darkness. On the road, where change is continuous and visible, time is not; rather it is something the rider only infers. Time is not the traveler's fourth dimension – change is.

Until next time . . . keep the wheels rollin' . . . making choices and taking responsibility . . .

Going To the City I Love

Joplin, Missouri. As I write this first entry of the month of June, I am in Joplin, Missouri, on my way to my beloved city of Dallas, Texas, where I will see people whom I love. It's the first time I've been back to The Great State of Texas since Terry and I quit teaming in April.

I will only have two days, but those will be hours I will cherish when I'm back in the truck on the road in my journey of solitude.

An unexpected but treasured part of this weekend will be that I will get to see my Daddy, who is working in Dallas next week, and will arrive on Sunday night.

And, even before this time off the road begins, I am already looking forward with anticipation my time off in July in Georgia with my family, whom I haven't seen since the end of February. That will also be the time my Mama comes out on the road with me for about 10 days right after that. I am looking forward to that as well.

Digging up my own history. I have said many times in this blog over the past two years that I have regularly kept a journal of some kind since 1976, when I was 11 years old. For the most part, except for looking up something in particular as a reference, I have not read those old journals since they were written.

After my recent reunion with the children and grandchildren of my heart in Dallas, I was curious to remember the history of my ties to them – how it began when I first met them in 1985, and how it grew and continued over the next few years as our lives became intertwined in ways I never could have imagined.

Reading those old entries from over 20 years ago brought back in vivid detail parts of my own life, and my life with these people (and others), that were shadowy images at best, and forgotten in the mists of passing time at worst.

In addition to rehearsing the story of my connections with those to whom I have been reunited recently, there is the history of other connections which helped chart the course of my life then, and to the present. In those pages are my friends from those days – Billy, Greg, and the beginning of my friendship with Terry. Others who were there have disappeared from the pages of my life and I wonder where they are and how they are – who they are after two decades have spanned.

Billy, my first friend in Dallas, and the one with whom my connection has been most persistent over these long years, and whom it was my joy to be able to visit in April, was a light in a dark place for me so many times during those years when I was so young. We used to have lunch once a week in those days, and there was a time when my kids were in a dangerous situation (indeed, more than once), and when my care for them was almost overwhelming to me as a young man in ministry. When my eyes failed and my faith flagged for want of hope, Billy always encouraged me and strengthened me as he listened to me, counseled me, and prayed with me. And, in the remembering, I am encouraged even now. There is no better man in this world than my friend Billy D. Thanks, Billy. Your friendship continues to bless me even as I write these words.

There is Greg also from those pages I have dusted off to read with joy. We went to school together, studying theology and the other things that were necessary to prepare us to do what we felt we were called – destined – to do. Most of all, we worked together, first in ministry together and then afterwards at a juvenile detention facility. He lives in those pages, and ever has in my memory and heart, as one of the best friends I've ever had. I do not think I wrote an entry in those days in Dallas in which he was absent – in matters great and small, Greg was there when many people would not have been. In the time I'm currently reading of – toward the end of 1987 – Greg and his wife Donna opened their home to me (even though they had two kids and very hectic lives) and I lived with them for a time. Such friends as they were to me are a rare gift, to be remembered with joy.

Reading so much of Greg and Donna, whom I hadn't seen or spoken to in many years, prompted me to try to contact them – and it worked. We caught up with each other and it was pure manna for me to renew (to whatever extent) those ties with people who meant – and mean – the world to me.

In uncovering these artifacts of time past from my own history, it has been interesting to discover that in the process of reading mere words I wrote so long ago, I am coming to know the person I was and the person I have become a little more clearly. As I gaze through the prism of the past 20 years of experience, I find myself reinterpreting and reintegrating into my present those events, memories, struggles, and successes hidden in those pages.

And I grow, learn, laugh, and am somehow more whole than I was before.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Blood Meridian. No Country For Old Men. All The Pretty Horses. The Orchard Keeper. I have Terry to thank for introducing me to the incredibly beautiful and haunting writing of Cormac McCarthy (which he did with Blood Meridian ). Reading his rhythmic prose is more like reading poetry, evoking images and emotions like almost no one else I've ever read.

His writing is brutal in its beauty, and his stories are perhaps not for the faint of heart or for those who like clearly laid distinctions of black and white dimensions. If you saw the excellent movie, No Country For Old Men , you have an idea what I'm talking about.

That said, I have just finished listening to The Road , for which McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007, and I would say that it is one of the most profoundly moving and abjectly frightening books I have read (or listened to in this case) in a very long time. It is a parable of apocalypse, loss, and survival. What do you have when there is nothing left? Who are you when who you were is taken away in violent upheaval and loss?

Like Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy is worth reading simply for his use of language. He is a craftsman with no peer for economy and imagery of words.

I recommend The Road with pleasure. Fasten your seatbelt – but do take the trip.

Until next time . . . keep the wheels rollin' . . . making choices and taking responsibility . . .

Allan