Recently, I was only my way home from NYC late at night when I pulled off to get a coke. As I walked back to my car, I heard that sound that I love to hear, that echoy whooshing dopplered moan of the tractor-trailers roaring down the pike. For some reason, that sound, only at night, instantly transports me back to my childhood. My parents both being from the same part of New England took my brothers and I to Cape Cod (pronounced: keep cad) at least 2 times a year, some years 3 and 4 times throughout my childhood.
My Dad, being a practical and rational man, decided the only way to drive his wife and 4 young boys up to the Cape was in the middle of the night. No traffic to deal with. No childish arguments. Just tiny snores and the occasional pee-pee break. There's something about waking up to that sound in the dark in the middle of the night that imprinted it on some deep recess of my brain.
So as I walked back to my car, I fondly remembered all the trips to Cape Cod mashed together and overlapping in my mind. I remembered as a young child believing that the other exits we passed weren't really real. It seemed to me as if my family's exit and my grandparent's exit were real but the other weren't really real. They were more like the plastic houses on Dad's model train set. They were imaginary, not real.
I remembered that point as a young teen when it first occurred to me that someone else might drive by my exit and think it wasn't really real. They might think that my whole life, everything I know, was imaginary. For a moment, I felt microscopic. It was as if seeing my life from a stranger's point of view made everything I know somehow less important. I wonder if that's what drives some men to seek fame; the notion that if I make you think my life is important, then my life feels more important to me?
I don't know why I told you this. I only know: Next Right, Exit 5. I think I'm home.
