Impressionist wing

When I travel alone, even somewhere as close as nearby as Chicago, I am on the lookout for signs and signals that tell me what to expect. I have written before about how an iTunes shuffle can make or break a trip, fill me with anticipation or dread. I think this all stems back to a family trip when I was probably about 9 years old. We were living in London and we were driving up to Scotland for a vacation. We had everything packed. We had snacks for the car. We had games to play along the way. As we locked the door of the house, I was filled with a sense of dread, a fear that something terrible was going to happen. I was not usually an anxious child, so when I said I didn’t want to go, that I wanted to go back inside, my mother was concerned. But she let me know that it was time to go. I reluctantly got into the car with the rest of the family and we started to drive. It was then I realized we’d forgotten the grapes, a special treat for the car. I started freaking out, having some kind of tantrum. I begged to go back, but my parents said know. And then we were off.

We were about halfway to where we were going to stay for the night when it started to rain. It wasn’t anything particularly unusual, but the traffic was heavy. Suddenly there was a horrible jolt. Out the side window I saw a mini (known today in the US as a Mini Cooper) spin by me in the next lane, going backwards. It had been right behind us a minute before. Behind him was a semi whose brakes had failed. Our car was totaled, but we were all okay. In fact, despite the fact that some 40 or 50 cars were smashed and the highway was closed for hours, no one was hurt. Our luggage was destroyed though, the red leatherette bags that my parents had bought for their honeymoon, including the glamorous oval toilette case lined with satin with a mirror on the inside of the lid and lots of intriguing pockets. We had to open our bags with a crowbar. Everybody looked at me. Had I known? I’m still not sure. I sat there like a ghost and shook.

We stopped for the night ancient inn just off the road. It had originally been a large manor house and it had a priest hole, used for hiding a Catholic priest during the era of Henry VIII when Catholics were being killed for their beliefs. In the morning, we rented a car and continued on our way. We searched in vain for the Loch Ness Monster, took lots of pictures of Eileen Donan castle, which we insisted on calling Eileen Dover, and learned to skip stones in Loch Lomond (in all the pictures there, my brother has his sweater on inside out; no one remembers why). We took the train back to London. In retrospect, it was an adventure, one of many family events that we talked about for years.

Several things went wrong on my way out of the house Thursday on my way to meet freshhell. First, there was the dead mouse I found in the basement as I was replacing the dehumidifier. Second, there were the lights that suddenly went out for no apparent reason, which I couldn’t figure out how to put back on again. Third, when I went to print out the liner notes for a CD I’d made for freshhell, I discovered I was out of ink. She is stuck with my scribble on a mangled CD liner. Fourth, when I turned on and plugged into my iPod while waiting for the train, it froze before playing a note of music. The screen is, for the record, stuck on Diana Ross singing “Stop! In the name of love.” I thought I would be able to fix it on the train by hooking it up to my laptop, but while my computer knew the device was plugged in, it did not appear on the desktop. And finally, while I was in the middle of typing this entry, my computer suddenly switched off with no warning and plenty of battery power left. It would not restart.*

Fortunately, though, that was the last of my drama for the day. I arrived downtown and found the weather, which had been stormy at home, had cleared. I found the lovely freshhell easily in our meeting place in the garden next to the Art Institute. We walked around and looked at art. It was nice to visit a museum with a grownup for a change and especially nice to finally meet freshhell in person. Looking at art, at least the way I look at it, is not especially conducive to conversation. Trying to talk about looking at art always makes me feel like a dork, but since freshhell has a lot of artistic relatives, it was a lot of fun to go through the museum with her. Afterwards, we headed up the street for pizza and beer, which was highly satisfactory on a hot day, even though our waiter had the tendency to disappear at inopportune moments and we had to beware of water dripping from an overhead duct. But the disappearing waiter gave us plenty of time to talk, and it wasn’t even all about our kids (although quite a bit of it was, I admit it; after all, they are all very interesting people). I did my best not to feel tongue-tied and shy. I gave freshhell the aforementioned lamely produced CD mix and she gave me a real CD of Corinne Bailey Rae, which I’ve been enjoying immensely. But even better, she gave AJ a delightfully subversive book called The Crown Snatchers, which had been a favorite of hers as a child. Both AJ and I are enthralled with it and he’s been carrying it around with him wherever he goes. Thanks so much, freshhell! I hope you enjoyed the rest of your visit and had a good trip home. I thought of you and Dusty when we saw the great big full moon on Saturday night.

After saying goodbye to freshhell, I was stuck with my own company and no iPod or computer. I was forced to read the Chicago Reader cover to cover. Even the Learning Annex insert, which was educational in and of itself. When I got home, I discovered that my computer did in fact work and that the iPod, which finally ran out of battery power and turned off, was right as rain after being recharged. I credit my association with freshhell with the return of my appliance karma.

*As a public service announcement, I believe I have found the reason for this: the battery I received in exchange for my powerbook’s original battery, which was recalled by Apple less than a year ago, was defective. The battery was somehow causing the computer to overheat beyond a level that could be controlled by the fan. I swapped out the battery with my spare and voila! (or “Viola!,” as my grandmother used to say, in homage to my aunt’s childhood mispronunciation of a line from her older sister’s French textbook: Vy-ola! Less elephants! (Voila! Les elephants!)). The problem seems to be fixed.