Stories from the Road

I recently returned from two weeks and a half weeks away from my little home in Chapel Hill. John and the kids and I drove (in separate cars) to Norcross, Georgia where we spent a week visiting with family - some local and some also visiting from out of town. The next week, Virginia started music camp and I drove to Kansas City, Missouri to attend the National Storytelling Conference. After the conference I drove back to Norcross and the family and I returned to Chapel Hill together.

I had a couple of moments in my car along the way:

1) St. Christopher
I was able to take Virginia to her first day of music camp in Athens before departing for Kansas City. Horatio and I hung out in a coffee shop while she was at camp and then the kids and I met up with my dear friend Jackie before heading back to Norcorss. On the drive that afternoon, I glimpsed the sun visor of the car in this certain way that inexplicably made me expect to see St. Christopher there. I was driving John's car - a Honda, like my first car. My first car was 10 years old when I got it and a hand-me-down from my grandmother. Grandma Mary was Catholic and had a St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, clipped onto the sun visor. She left him in my car and got a new clip for her new car. I never bothered to remove him. I am somewhat of a nervous driver and a very nervous passenger. I come by it honestly - both nature and nurture. So, I figured I could use a little extra protection. I remember moving St. Christopher from that first car into the second. But he's not with me now. At some point he didn't make the transition between cars. But as I drove from Athens after music camp, I suddenly remembered that St. Christopher had once been my constant driving companion and felt a pang of nostalgia - for my grandmother, for my first car, for other drives between Athens and Gwinnett.

2) Mom Sound System
The auxiliary input in my car has been on the fritz for a while and on the initial drive from Chapel Hill to Norcross it finally crapped out. This is a problem because, even though there is a CD player in the car, and XM radio, I prefer to listen to audio books on car trips, which are on my phone - either through Audible or Overdrive. John tried to fix the aux in, and when that didn't work, he bought me a bluetooth speaker. I set off for Kansas City happily listening to my books blasting from a speaker I clipped to the head rest of the passenger seat. The humorous parallel to road trips my sister and I took with my mother as children was not lost on me. My mother had a car with a working radio, but no tape deck. She wanted to listen to her music. She did this by bringing a boom box on the trip. It sat in the passenger seat. (My sister and I never sat up front because mom said we would fight over the privilege.) The boom box played tapes and ran on C batteries. My speaker on the passenger seat is not unique. It simply represents the next generation of the mom sound system.