Crown Point, Monday

Interstate driving is subtraction. It’s whittling yourself down white dash by white dash until you’re finally as simple as you were supposed to be.

It’s meditation. It’s watching white windmills on mile 191 fade into a horizonless winter backdrop. Line after line stretching back into the fields, hypnotic three-blade turn, slender metal arms diving after one another. Wait. There’ll be a moment when they synchronize, when you could line up all those windmills and pass your arm through the space between their blades, press the sun into your palm without touching a single one. Watch. It’ll only be a moment. You can keep your eyes off the road for a second; your hands do all the driving, anyway. The sun’s been setting earlier each day. It’s time you learned by touch.

It’s three hours of fogging up the windshield with singing, pretending your breath is what spins those pinwheel windmills. Wind power, mind power; an m is just a w flipped upside down. It’s finding out you have more to sing than you have to say. Somehow, someone else’s words could tell a stranger more about you than you could. You’d like to say it’s because you’re a work of art, something deeper than a slapdash splash of rotting paint on a genetic canvas, but you know better. It's simpler and more beautiful than that. 

Highway driving is solace. It’s pulling yourself home by that double yellow line on the asphalt, that elongated equal sign you could take as a metaphor for eternity if you let yourself think too much (which you do: roads like rivers feed into each other, everything loops back into itself, everything is everything). It’s passing a car going the opposite way and imagining you both watching the other and thinking, yeah, I’ve been there. 








wind power

Winter makes me want to:

clack peppermint sticks along my teeth like boys dragging sticks against whitewashed fences in film summers that spin and spin on the reel, whirring and flashing like a bicycle wheel

lay my neck on the guillotine edge of a metal sink, cut my spine with tap water and dye my hair rust red from a box (because I am iron just now learning how to breathe)

run a shaving razor up my calves in the shower so my fingers graze the stubble rows, stark and shorn like lines of harvested corn stalks sticking up from a layer of frost; wait for my snow-pale skin to melt, to run away and join the hot water like the daughter I am

tuck my arms into my mother’s red coat, step out onto the patio with bare feet until the blood runs blue and slow; go back inside, shed the coat and curl my toes, feel the burning bee-buzz of my soles’ atoms humming like summer against the carpet 

Thank you

I’m two for two.

This is the second consecutive winter my car—a separate car each time—has decided to break down despite my best efforts to keep it happy. Both times, I managed to end up with the best case for the worst scenario, but, still, it’s starting to get irritating.

Today after lunch, I decided to go to Target to pick up a few things. When I started the engine, everything was fine. The bottom of my windshield and passenger's side windows were layered with a thin film of ice which was easily chipped off with my ice scraper. Yesterday it had snowed magnificently, but by noon today most of it had melted. 

I let the car warm up for a few minutes while I flipped through my CDs and slipped The XX into the player. The volume was reasonable; I’m fairly certain I would have heard horrible coughing or at least a pathetic whine from my engine if something was amiss, especially since I gave it warm-up time in which it could have decided it wanted to die and warned me appropriately.

Keep in mind that my car is a 2004 model, I had it serviced a couple months ago, and I had driven it two days ago without any problems. 

Things were normal. So, I pulled out of the parking lot and onto the Lloyd, a four-lane expressway that cuts through the city. After about two minutes driving on the Lloyd, my car started making a disturbing rattling noise from what seemed to be somewhere under the hood. This was not good.

I decided that, rather than continuing down the Lloyd and possibly subjecting myself to a fiery and angry death if my car decided to give up in the middle of a busy intersection, I should get off the expressway and call someone who could tell me how to soothe the alarming noises my car was intent on making despite my reassurance. I felt like a mom. All I could do was stroke the dashboard and say, "I don't know what you want!" 

I made the next left off, drove down another road, stopped at a stop sign, and stopped.

And stopped.

And stalled.

“Drive” meant nothing to my car anymore. I might as well have torn out the gas pedal and thrown it out the window.

After turning the ignition off and back on again to no avail, I sheepishly opened my door and looked at the black truck behind me.

“Uh, I think my car just died. Please just go around me,” I yelled back to the man driving the truck. 

He asked me if I had a phone or could call anyone; I answered yes. After a few other questions, he offered to help me push my car just across the street to the D-Patrick body repair shop. Luckily, the little two-way road was much less crowded than the Lloyd, and we easily got it across.

I thanked Steve—I’d learned his name—and he went on his way.

The D-Patrick folks were incredibly nice and friendly. Since my car was a Dodge and didn’t need body repair, they themselves couldn’t do anything for me, but they called their tow truck and referred me to a Dodge dealership where I could get help. One of the guys, Darryl, even called the dealership and warned one of his buddies down there to take care of me. 

Steve called D-Patrick later to make sure I was all right. I wish I'd thought to ask his last name so I could have sent him a thank-you note, at least. 

I spent the next two hours in the small D-Patrick office waiting for the tow truck (first snow makes for careless drivers and busy tow truck workers) and talking with the receptionist, Christy. She spoke clearly, but softly; if the office and street outside had been louder, I definitely would have had trouble hearing her. But we heard each other and got along well. I learned she worked two jobs and had a master’s in accounting, but she was still looking for a full-time job. We ended up talking about college, Kentucky, dialects, and the holidays, among other things, before the tow truck arrived. 

Justin towed me to Expressway Dodge, where I talked to Darryl’s buddy Ron and got things worked out with my car. As it was near closing time, they wouldn’t be able to get to it until tomorrow morning, but they’d call me as soon as they did. My roommate picked me up and took me home, where I ate a hot plate of spaghetti. 

Today could have been much worse than it was.

I like people.  

8:00 shower

Thirty minutes’ worth of water polishes me like a stone; soon all my edges will be smoothed. I am a wonder of wishes and physics. You could pick me up, kiss and skip me across water.

But I am allowed to slow down. I am allowed to dance and spin and take the time to breathe, angle my body and scan my reflection in the water before I break the surface tension.

The experts know. It’s a simple twenty degrees—not a difference of speed—between sinking and skipping. 

Stone Skipping Gets Scientific