Errands

I just got back from taking the kids up the road towards the mountain house, where they will spend the weekend with my parents. I met my dad at the halfway point. Or, in one version of the story that could be told, I drove fifteen miles past the meeting point and had to turn around and come back.

My version of the story is more complex. It has to do with Demorest, GA, the planned rendezvous point, being not very well marked coming from the south, and my thinking I was somehow passing through Cornelia when I was passing through both towns, somehow, and then I was introducing Hank and Laura to Tenacious D and I wasn't as super duper alert to the signage as I might have been, though I will say that sign was in a weird place, like way up over the road instead of off to the right where I was looking.

I called my dad as I was approaching Cornelia. "Okay, I'm almost to Cornelia. Is Demorest a lot past that?" (Here you might be thinking, "Becky, don't you make this trip, from your house to the mountain house, all the time?" Yes, yes I do, but it's remarkably hard to remember what comes after what except that the Goats on the Roof are just before Clayton, and some ways before that is a Subway/gas station with the World's Dirtiest Bathroom, and there's a Chick-fil-A in Clayton (closed Sunday), and somewhere past Franklin there's that Walmart we went in that one time to buy Legos. That's my mental map of the route.)

So when I called Dad he said, "Yes, Demorest is up the road past Cornelia, I'm in Tallulah Gorge right now, and I'll be at the spot in fifteen minutes." Cool, okay, I rang off and motored right along until all of a sudden I found myself in Tallulah Gorge. I figured that space had somehow twisted itself, mobius-fashion, and I had wound up on the far side of the meeting point without ever going through the meeting point.

It was with genuine bewilderment that I called him again and said, "What just happened? I am in Tallulah somehow. I am not sure what to do." Dad drew on the patience and clarity that he honed during his thirty years as an educator. "Uh, turn around? Go the other way," he explained. Then he gave a series of instructions involving mile markers and an Arby's, and I got the car pointed in the other direction and found him.

Sometimes I just like to go driving around Georgia.

On the way home, by myself, in the afterglow of a jamocha milkshake, I was thinking about that phrase, "the Sandwich Generation," for people who find themselves being caregivers for older parents while still having kids at home. It's related, I guess, both to the trends of aged folks living longer and to people waiting until later to start their families. For some reason it came to my mind, and I thought how I feel like I'm in a sandwich too, only it's a good sandwich that makes my life easy. I have these children I love and am enjoying bringing up, and yet I still feel as nurtured by my own parents as I did when I was a little girl. It's a happy sandwich and I am grateful for it.

I came home to Matt, both of us ready to commence our childless weekend, and before we could, one of his artists was leaving and broke his car key. So Matt is right now driving him home while I wait. Artists, man. Seriously, they can barely keep their shit together. This is the guy who got his car stuck in our front yard one time. Jeebus. I don't know what it is.

Not really artists, jk! You know I love you!

But that errand gave me a chance to pop in and say Happy Friday to you guys.

I hope you get yourself into a good sandwich this weekend.

xoxo