It's all about going somewhere
By PAT WICK
© Another Day in the Country
When my sister Jessica was a little girl and I'd be coming home for vacation from college — yes that's what 12 years age difference is like — she'd be all expectant. "Let's do something exciting," she would say. Exciting meant getting in the car and going to McDonalds to get french fries, usually. It was the going somewhere that was important.
I've known Em, who lives across the street, since she was a baby girl and going somewhere always was on her mind. When she was tiny, her older sister would dress her all up in fancy clothes and prop her in a tiny pedal car that someone had given them. Em would squeal with delight because she was going somewhere. It was usually across the street to my house or down the block and back but the adventure was in the going.
As soon as Em was able to navigate on her own she loved going somewhere with me. She'd climb up on my lap and beg to steer the car and we'd go around and around the blocks of Ramona. Now that Em's in fifth grade, the going somewhere urge is even stronger.
"Are you going somewhere today?" she'll often ask on weekends, hoping she can go along. "Is it a grown-up thing?" she wants to know. Grown-up things are buying building supplies and shopping for groceries. Kid things are going to the mall and movies. Sadly, our recent trips are mostly grown-up things.
So Em climbs into her daddy's van, cranks up the radio, sits behind the wheel, and pretends that she is going somewhere. The other day she had her sister's little girl in the car with her. Allison was standing at the car window, waiting for the view to change and the only thing that moved was me — waving from the front porch across the street. Em was singing along with the tune on the radio at the top of her lungs. Allison was laughing and pounding on the window to wave back to me. They were having a grand old time — going somewhere.
There is in all of us this lust for adventuring. "So what would you like to do today," I sometimes ask Tooltime Tim when we don't have a long list of projects on our docket. "Ah, I don't know," he'll say and then he admits with a grin, "I'd just like to get in the truck and DRIVE!" He's not too picky about the direction or the destination — it's the going that soothes his soul.
My old friend Doc loved to be on the go. At 80 he crawled onto a bus with a bunch of college kids and headed to a convention in Florida. At 84 he took his annual trek to the Mayo Clinic for a check-up and on the way home he ended up in a bus depot stranded in who-knows-where. He called me in California in the middle of the night, "I just had to hear a familiar voice," he said and then began to recite an old poem I'd studied in English class many years before about longing for the lights of home. At 85 he gamely climbed into his big old car and headed for California. He needed care, someone nearby to help, but he called it an adventure — he was going somewhere.
And he kept that adventuring spirit until the day he died. We sometimes talked about death and dying, Doc and I — it was more for me than him. I was 35 years younger, attempting to understand life from his vantage point and fretting about the loss of this fine old friend who loved defying the odds.
He even treated the idea of dying as an adventure — he'd be going somewhere. "It's farewell Homberg, hello halo," he'd say with a laugh, "Life's opening up Pandora's box. All kinds of goodies in store." It was his way of encouraging me not to fret about the future.
I've got the urge to go somewhere, today. Honduras would be interesting, Hawaii would be wonderful, Houston has fine art galleries, I hear, but I'll have to settle today for Herington — a sleepy little town on the prairie that sports a great lumberyard and I'm in need of wire mesh for sanding dry-wall. Yep, it's just another day in the country!
