Yesterday, Betty and I drove in tandem as far as the Georgia Welcome Center, then she peeled off to head to Peachtree City and I drove here to Lawrenceville....
I missed Betty and her little brown Civic after we'd been weaving along I65 and I85 together for all those hours.
She's always teasing me about my "perilous pull-overs"--me pulling off by the side of any road to take a picture when one calls. As trucks whizz by and she sits in the passenger seat rolling her eyes, I can just hear her saying, as she so often actually does, "I'm going to have to be the one to call Carlene and tell her you're dead."
There were no perilous pullovers yesterday, not even a single temptation to break the flow of forward-moving traffic or risk being swept into the Wild Blue Yonder by the tight string of 18-wheelers in which we and a few other cars found ourselves.
Expressways are mostly devoid of photo opportunities, anyway. On the back roads, the world is far more interesting, textured and slow; major highways make me believe the world is flat all over again. So Betty and I drove along, our cars like two little paper boats in the same current, both on cruise control, she listening to satellite radio, me listening to podcasts.
I particularly enjoyed the Invisibilia podcast. In one episode, Hanna Rosen tells about how her mother decided one day she wanted to jump out of an airplane--and that story leads to an interesting discussion about losses. Not that her mother died from jumping (she didn't), but the jump helped her to begin to get past the worst of the grief after the death of her husband of 51 years.
https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510307/invisibilia
On one Super Soul podcast, Oprah talks to Trevor Noah (my favorite comedian, The Daily Show) about his life and work and his book, Born a Crime.
Finally: On Being With Krista Tippet. On Monday, as Betty and I were driving to the causeway heading into New Orleans, I heard a voice that sounded familiar. She was reading the last few lines of a poem. It turns out it was Naomi, our Naomi, from San Antonio--and I made a mental note to listen to the entire episode. I'm all set up to listen with Carlene when she gets back from the beauty shop.
https://onbeing.org/blog/the-gift-of-presence-the-perils-of-advice/
https://onbeing.org/series/podcast/
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