Tripping thoughts

Funny. When I was a teenager I had three big dreams. I wanted to own my own house, write a novel, and travel. Now I’ve owned 10 or 11 houses and am in the one where I hope to stay for the rest of my life. I love it. Don’t regret a minute of it. I wrote a novel. Two if you count the compilation of Hardyville Tales. And I don’t know how many non-fiction books. Not the Great American Novel I had in mind at 16, but I did what I could and am glad of it.

I also traveled. I’ve been to Ireland and England (twice), Samoa (both of them), Japan, Canada (several times), Nicaragua, and Panama. I’ve visited maybe half the 50 states. But from the first moment I spent in an airport waiting for flight, I did not like traveling one bit. Not to say I haven’t had some good times and memorable experiences while traveling. But waaaaay too many of the memorable experiences involve things like breaking down in the middle of nowhere or descending joltingly out of storm clouds to discover the plane was about to land on the terminal roof rather than the runway.

Compared to world travels, the trip I’m on now is nothing. But it was white-knuckle driving, ugly city traffic, poor visibility from rain-whipping trucks, and of course, car troubles still unresolved as I type this. I swear, I’m done. When I get home, I’m never leaving again.

I have everything I want — and love — in my tiny town. And most anything that’s not there, Amazon will send to my door. Fancy doctors and hospitals? Who needs ’em? Home is truly sweet. I’ve seen the world. I have a pretty darned good slice of it.

Narrowing life down to such limited parameters could be a negative thing if it means getting cranky and narrow-minded. OTOH, it could be a wonderful thing if I focus my adventures within.

This is something I’ll be thinking about today in the float tank. (It might be hard not to keep thinking about Old Blue and getting home, but even my tiny experience from December tells me that float tanks have a way of carrying a person in unexpected directions.)

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I took back roads into the Big City for yesterday’s appointment with the surgeon. I like backroads. I liked the route even more when it carried me into the city limits via an industrial area. I like industrial areas. Hardly any traffic. I was able to travel far into the city before encountering the inevitable. But when it came, hooboy, it was immediate, total urban overload.

Blocks upon blocks of new high-rise residential construction. High-rise non-residential construction pushing warehouses out of the way and blocking historic views. Streets under continuous repair. And these were tiny, narrow streets built for some other era that were now being forced to carry not only modern traffic but to carry every politically correct and ecologically proper notion of city transport from bike lanes to electric public transit vehicles. All in the same tiny pair of lanes that probably carried Model Ts once upon a time.

Then Mapquest, bless its heart, which had gotten me that far without a blip, missed a detail. Where their directions said, “Turn left on Valley Street” they should have said, “Turn left on Hill Street, which becomes Valley Street” (names have been changed to protect the innocent). And this glitch naturally occurred right in the midst of a desperate spaghetti of highway on-ramps and “right turn only” lanes.

All I can say is it’s a good thing I allowed nearly five hours for the 3.5-hour drive. I still got to my appointment a little early, but I had to spend that time decompressing lest my blood-pressure reading cause the nurses to call out the emergency cart.

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Then I had more time to decompress after being moved into the exam room because the doctor had a problem with another patient and was about 20 minutes late. Both he and the nursing staff were amazingly apologetic about that. Surprised me. I can’t recall anybody ever apologizing for a doctor’s lateness before. But not only did a nurse come in to let me know, but the doctor himself rushed away from his other patient to come in, shake my hand, and assure me he’d be right there, really.

Can one decompress while sitting in a scary room with a table that looks like a Megamind torture device and gruesome pictures of innards on the wall?

Well, you can if you have an excellent selection of magazines to peruse. I had a copy of Children’s Highlights, last month’s issue of Family Circle, the winter 2015 issue of NCM (the magazine of Nazarine Compassionate Ministries), and my favorite — the August/September 2016 issue of Hay and Forage Grower.

I kid you not. I had no idea there was such a publication as Hay and Forage Grower. And what it was doing in this den of urban and medical sophistication I have no idea. I did learn a new term from the editors of Hay and Forage: “shredlage processor.” I still have no idea what a shredlage processor might be, but apparently in the trade there’s a huge, vicious controversy going on about whatever it is. Backstabbing. Lawsuits. People not speaking to each other. And who knew? I suppose I could have learned more by subscribing to eHay, their weekly e-newsletter, but I declined and moved on.

I moved on to NCM where, in an article about children in crisis in the Middle East, I read in a mini-bio of one small boy that “most Christians had left his town because, in the end, the decision was death or conversion to another faith.”

Conversion to another faith. Now, what faith might that be? Hm. Taoism, possibly? Tibetan Buddhism? Santeria? The publication was amazingly mum on the faith in question, leaving me to ponder religious mysteries until the surgeon arrived.