Vista,Cruiser
The Caddy canters up the 101. North of Santa Barbara in the rain, the windshield wipers serve as metronome to Brian Fallon’s “Nobody Wins”. A love’s lost / fond remembrance song two notches closer to Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean” than the Replacements’ “Left of the Dial”, it also ponders (positively, because why not?) the big stuff of who we are when we move on. … and hey … hey little Tommy Gun, I guess we’re never gonna end up the lucky ones … and oh … if I never see you again, have a round on me love, hallelujah, nobody wins. I sing along, because I do when no one is looking. You can too (here). When they are looking, I still sing along, just in my head.
The head has three major settings; sing, think, sleep. They’re more knobs than switches, because the singing and thinking continue through much of the sleeping. If you get the knobs just right (sleep at zero, think somewhere less than one and sing at either less than one or eleven) you can dial up some feeling. (it’s not a perfect science) The 3:00 AM battles of thinking that I should stop singing so sleep gets a chance are not something I’d wish on others, and they’ve been worse of late. I’ll chalk it up to Cubs World Series tension, and ignore other reasons for it.
Seaside to Phoenix is ten plus hours, says Google Maps, so off I go. Just one daughter, and the first Wrigley Field World Series we’ve ever experienced, so I can’t let a desert stand in the way of that. Leave the Jeep at MRY and wrangle an up spec Cadillac CTS for the let’s make it under nine hours drive. Fast and comfortable aren’t the Jeep’s strong suits, but the Car & Driver 10 Best winner eats miles with aplomb. Twin turbos, magnetorheological dampers, Bose sound. Until Lincoln gets their act together and drops the mumbling pretty boy, this is the American Interstate (and why would you pilot something non-American on an Interstate?) ICBM of choice.
There’s a healthy horrid supply of casino hotels to sleep at east of LA along I-10, but I’ll leave the nastiness to others. Full recline the passenger seat, full open the CTS sunroof and let the Milky Way rotate through the utter blackness of Joshua Tree National Park at night. Casinos are - by definition - for losers, and there’s nothing like a desert sunrise for an alarm clock.
Two star-filled desert nights, 1,522 sing whatever I want miles, a pleasant chat with an Arizona State Trooper, two Portillo’s hotdogs and a Cubs’ loss. That’s a 4 – 1 record for the weekend, not counting the star attraction; time with Amanda. … and hey … hey pretty baby, I still remember you driving me crazy … and oh … if I never see you again, have a round on me love, hallelujah, nobody wins. The Cubs making it into the Series is the slimmest of excuses for two nine hour drives to see her for a few hours, but it’s excuse enough.
So ... they lose. That’s baseball. Designed to break your heart, and all that. The youngsters are all trying to be sluggers, and they’re chock full of incandescent youngsters. That Kluber kid can pitch, by the way.
But the heart’s unbreakable this day. Amanda takes me to her school, and shows me her classroom. When the mortal meanderings highlight reel gets played back, this space will be featured. Her first professional workplace; and if you marched me through a thousand random classrooms, I could pick out this one was hers at first glance. Neat and tidy. Earnest and hopeful. Smart and adventurous. I sit in a back row chair and try to recall the too cool for school modus operandi but it just doesn’t work in this space. All I can imagine is her encouraging students to do their best. They’re very lucky.
So, as I sing along on the 101, I wonder if Brian might be wrong. I sure won the daughter and son derby.
