Lost Highways

Because I sometimes can't help posting sadness, that's all the more reason to blog about the moments of pure joy in my life...

As I type, I'm pulled over to the side of the road on I-69, heading south. I had a real nice weekend with my mom (see A Melodramatist Muses...) and now I'm on my way home...driving through the center of the state, the center of middle-America... I passed a hawk stretching his wings as he perched on the fence, a reddish-gold assortment of horses in a green-green field, wide open expanses of corn, soybeans just beginning to yellow, trees showing faint tints of gold and scarlet. The sky is real gray....beautiful. The clouds shift around, trying to arrange themselves for rain. I'm doing something I love to do and don't get to do much anymore: drive--alone--in the car, radio cranked, loving Indiana even on a gray September morning. I think, does it get better than this? And then, it does. Hoosier-born Mellencamp comes on--with the greatest instrumental rock intro ever--and starts whining about lovers who drive him crazy. And suddenly, I'm 23 again and driving over to Urbana to see Donny. I remember you, Donny, and that boathouse summer. I remember your skinny runner's legs and how you'd run the seven miles in to camp and the seven miles back into the sunrise. I'm many roads away from you now, but I remember....oh, yes.

So I'm driving down the highway (4 miles over the speed limit instead of the 35 miles over I used to do) and jamming to the music of much younger days, a head full of a good life's worth of memories, and a heart full of the joy of living. "Well, I'm not wiped out by this poolroom life I'm living, gonna quit this job or go to school or head back home...and I'm not asking to be loved or be forgiven...." Johnny Cougar is complaining, but I'm not. Turn it up louder, roll down the windows, 23 is gone but not forgotten--nope. Does it get better than this? Does it get better than this? Does it get better? Does it?