My brother-in-law is driving, and he says, let's get off the highway. Don is nearly always the one driving, and always the one to say: back road! The rest of us say ho-hum. This time it turns out he's right. On that particular afternoon we drove only a few blocks out of our way, and in that stretch we saw: an old building whose brickwork was so beautiful I decided on the spot to become a mason. We saw a house where the porch had been draped, post-to-post, in long curtains, and it looked inviting and mysterious as a harem. And we saw backyard where a bright yellow caboose had taken up residence, complete with its own short set of railroad tracks. I saw the prettiest Arts and Crafts-style bungalow I have ever seen, in a town that's full of them. I saw a tractor-trailer hauling two long propellers that were headed to find a home on a turbine on a wind farm. They were nestled together like yin and yang on the bed of the truck, and I can tell you, without knowing exactly where this wind farm is, someone was raising hell about it appearing there at all.
Years ago Don told me that an elderly friend had said this: as you get older, you care less and less about more and more of the world around you, so that, by the time you die, you really don't mind so much. If this is the standard, I have to guess that Don is going to live well into his hundreds. When I met him nearly thirty years ago he was a one-trick pony, focusing on his business mostly and beyond that, I don't know. To see curiosity emerge as his primary trait now is fun for us both. His days are interesting, his curiosity is a window that opens onto his inner life and lets me have a look in. On our way home that night, we turn onto a back road in time to see a single hot air balloon drifting over the hill, toward sunset.
My kids are often unsuspecting captives on these trips, as their uncle is fond of hauling them around and never considers that they, as teenagers, might not share his enthusiasm for looking at things. Right now I have little hope that they find any of this one bit exciting, but I do have hopes that this trait of their uncle's gets into them now, and that it will find its way back out when they're old enough to appreciate it. I know it's not genetic; I hope it's genetic.
Don told me this story: the best thing I ever did, he said, was when I drove off the highway and into and through the town of Olney, Illinois. He said, I did nothing but go up and down the streets and look at houses and talk to anyone who would talk to me, and I told them all how their town's name was my name, too. By the time I drove back out of there at the end of the day, everyone was waving to me.
There's the back of the salt mine, there's an old movie theater, there's some beautiful brickwork, right there. When Don came to stay with my kids last spring while I was out of town, he brought his bicycle with him so that he could ride around and have a different sort of look at things. Every day is a back road sort of day, when you're him. He is examining an old train depot, he is photographing graffiti. He has discovered a web site where people are uploading two million images a day. There is not enough time, we tell each other. Probably there are not enough lifetimes to look at all these things, even if you calculate the probability of that on the high end of your rebirth odds. I wonder, given that, how do you decide which road to turn down, which thing you're going to look at, at the expense of every other thing you won't then have a chance to look at. Serendipity I guess. Serendipity, and you have to learn to not mind missing what you miss. Maybe that's what Don's elderly friend really meant by what he said: you make your peace with things. You look, and you learn to let that be enough.
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