All roads lead to home...

We’re home again after a low flying trip to New Jersey for The Rock’s father’s funeral. Thank you all for the good thoughts and wishes. We appreciate it. Before we zipped down there from here in New Hampshire, we went north for a quick visit with older sonny. The Rock is seriously thinking of having a steering wheel implanted into his chest for easy accessibility. Sleep? Why? We’ve concluded that sleep is a state of being reserved for other people. I hear it’s kind of nice. The Rock says sleep is for sissies.

Before we made the trip down, my job was to make arrangements to have the dog boarded, make sure someone would look in on the cat, notify the neighbors to watch the house and give them our destination phone number at the hotel in case of emergency, pack and order flowers to be from the whole family (us up here plus them down there). Thank goodness for the internet. I sweated the trip hoping and wondering if the order went through with sufficient time for the flowers to be delivered to the funeral home down there before the viewing. They were! They were beautiful. Thank goodness! It was a nice funeral…if you can say that about funerals. It was thoughtful, decently restrained and not ostentatious. It didn’t rain.

The trip down was a white knuckled nightmare. If we ever again complain about the traffic around here I hope someone will step on our toe to remind us that hell hath no fury like modern freeways and urban congestion. Holy cowbells, that is some traffic. We just kept saying to ourselves “thank goodness we escaped all those years ago or we’d be doing this every day too…” “Why would anybody willingly submit to living in a place like this?!” I had my set of squeezy stress balls with me and put them to their rightful use. I squeezed those darn things so hard I thought they’d ‘pop.’ Usually I only use them just to ease the stiffness out of my arthritic fingers or to make my vein pop up for the monthly PT blood draw.

It was nice to see everyone again even if the occasion was less than stellar. We got lots of hugging in and that’s always nice. Everyone said we should come down there to get together more often. We have lived in New Hampshire for nineteen years and usually get down there a couple of times a year. In nineteen years none of them has ever come to New Hampshire to see us. They don’t even ask what it’s like up here or what we do with our lives.

On the day we left, The Rock came home at lunchtime shaking his head and asking me if I noticed anything different about him. I looked him up and down and it didn’t take a second pass to realize that he had one old scuffed casual brown shoe on one foot and a shiny black dress shoe on the other. No, it wasn’t a special dress day at his work. They don’t have those. The funny thing is those shoes have different kinds of soles too so they’re a disparate height. He didn’t even have a clue that anything was different until he had gotten in the house and was climbing the back stairs and happened to catch a glimpse of his feet on the steps. If anyone at his workplace had noticed they never let on. They probably would just have attributed it to the eccentricity of one of ‘those scientist types’ anyway.

On the way down to New Jersey we saw a car pulled over to the side of the freeway and it was rocking up and down something fierce. It took us a while to figure out just what was happening. It was so weird the way it sat there on the side of the roadway rhythmically rocking while thousands of cars passed by. The occupants seemed to be in the backseat and fully or mostly clothed but after the initial confusion wore off we realized what was happening. That must be some kind of desperation I can tell you…

On our return trip we went into and out of rain systems but the sun was never far away and at one point we saw a very vivid double rainbow. It was awesome in the truest sense of the word. We also rode past some sort of country club and there were people all dressed to the nines milling around and on a parallel road to ours was a hansom cab drawn by two spiffy horses and a tuxedoed driver with a tophat on. In the cab was a couple in formal dress. I think it was a wedding. It was lovely to see and made our decision to take a different, less direct and also less trafficed route home worthwhile.

I also noticed noticed a cute license plate on an open trailer being pulled by a van. It said “Ewe Haul.” All and all, it was a nice time to be travelling as the trees are coming out and some are flowering so it was very pretty once we left those darn freeways behind. As usual, the closer we got to home in New Hampshire the quieter it got and the sparser traffic became. Nothing in the world could ever induce us to move back down there again. Even the rural area where we used to live is built up obscenely.

We’re back to normal (for us) again and made the round trip trek up north again tonight. Even in the pouring rain it was a much more restful ride than the trip down to Jersey. I should think those folks would be hankering to make a trip up here to get away from that. Our sinuses are finally starting to respond to the fresh air and The Rock is starting to feel better. He was really congested after 2 days there. We can’t help feeling that his dad, even though he had emphysema, would have lasted a little longer and been more comfortable if this was his environment instead. Remind me never to complain again…