A return trip from Maine

Our return trip from Maine was shockingly pleasant. Of course, it's sad that a pleasant trip amounts to nine and a half hours spent in the car. My standards for a nice trip had been dropped immeasurably by our elven and a half-hour trip to Vermont. I'd like to say that the trip had a lot of highlights, but mainly it just involved me sleeping in the front seat only to be awakened by S who wanted me to consistently check on the map to see if we were going in the right direction.

Maps are confusing things designed for paleolithic man in my experience, and I'm not as sharp with them as I could be. Besides the folding, which just never happens for me, maps have too many lines, and they lack the friendly yet commanding voice of our GPS. The GPS is the tool of the modern homo sapien sapien designed for the fast-paced person who doesn't have time to develop a "sense of place" or take an interesting back road chock full of squirrel nests and pretty spider webs filled with dew, when the good Lord built highways throughout the United States to convey travelers at a maximum speed while listening to music that will damage their eardrums.

Maps are really only useful when doing some good old-fashioned gerrymandering or doing a skit involving the dangers of map use on the highways. Hello, tenth grade drivers ed.

S and I went out to enjoy the Perseid meteor shower this evening. We left our humble abode on this nicely cooking evening to witness the once a year phenomenon. The only downside to viewing this meteor shower were listed in the article as: light pollution-check, bright moon-check, and cloud cover-check. Ergo; we sat out on a bench looking up at orange clouds and mistaking the blinking lights of planes for clouds. I'm sure that somewhere else in the world the shower was great and wonderful, but I really don't give a damn. It sucked here.

Anyhow, I'm lying on my back looking up at the sky, trying to remember the last time I sat quietly in nature or left my house without any real intent to "do" something and all I could think of was all the things I had to do when I got back home. The clouds looked like nothing but orange obstructions. I forced myself to take a deep breath, and I found myself staring up at the face of Alf, the eighties cartoon character who ate cats, then Poseidon blowing out a puff of wind with an army of clouds behind him. (Apparently Kafka has a great story about Poseidon in which he is so overwhelmed with paperwork that he never gets to enjoy the sea).

And S and I remembered back to the last meteor shower that we had seen together, years ago in Santa Barbara. We'd been lying on top of my car with another friend watching the greatest meteor shower of our lives (assuming a normal life span) and not leaving until 2:30 A.M. And I remember everyone at my college talking about the most amazing meteor that burned through the sky at around three A.M. and I remember regretting it then, and every day since. I am sad that I didn't stay up to watch the best meteor, and if I had known, I would have stayed up longer. And it feels like a metaphor or a lesson for most of life, that could be taken either way. Either stay up later, or learn to have gratitude for the things you have experienced rather than those that you haven't.

But the strangest part is to think about that meteor shower, now seven years gone, and realize that it is the best meteor shower that I will ever see in my time upon this lonely planet. The saying is, "the best is yet to come," but sometimes it has already passed.