You take Route 9 south for roughly 15 miles, past the office on your left where I once dropped off an envelope in a frenzy of torrential rain that day he and I decided it would be fun to back over a model of a Roman palace--the same day the bridge was closed due to the rain and he and I listened to The Hours soundtrack over the phone and marveled at the delay in sound travel. The same office building overlooks into a parking lot where she and I waited in the same rain for 20 minutes waiting for our turn. Maybe I could stay in this place and rot, at least I would be feeding the soil.
And then coming up on my left would be Red's, the liquor store across from the consignment store. And behind Red's, the Bagel Boy where she and I used to sit and talk about friends we didn't have in common, ideas we did not share, but the agreement that the man who parked in the handicap space was arrogant.
And later on down the road I would find a charity store where I spent 3 hours stacking and restacking children's toys to the point where I realized that once I moved something, another thing was out of place, that by volunteering my time and energy I was accomplishing nothing because I was not opening up a hospital or even donating to charity. I was just treading water. And what did I care, it was not my problem that other people were poor. So maybe the existentialists say that God is dead and that we are responsible for other people's problems, but those people sat around and philosophized while the rest toiled. Willie philosophized and never really did anything except hurt his family and nurture false impressions.
To the right would be the place where we once arrived in excitement, in absolute giddiness at the chance to operate a moving vehicle. The same place where I was too tall to control the kid car, but too short to steer the adult car. I crashed into a barrier of spare tires, and all I can remember thinking is, "I can't breathe in this helmet." And I haven't changed a bit, because if Georgia were a helmet I would be dead right now.
I would finally arrive at a Church; funny how everything ends with a church--you start off baptized in a church, and then you get married in a church, then the point when the pallbearers escort you to the church. I'm not even religious and that is how my life will be. But yet I can't just let it be something, I can't just let my life be a "Great Twitch." That would be a cop-out, and I still can't say that everything I do or will ever do will have an impact on someone else. Life isn't this pretty Charlotte's web, life is a frayed ball of twine swatted around by a cat in the back of an alley, a ball of twine that rolls through debris I would not like to imagine, the kind you find in the back of dilapidated old factories and are eventually washed away by the same great rain that closed the bridge that day we destroyed a Roman family's indoor plumbing. So yes, the journey ends at a church, where we will sit in chairs and produce music that nine times out of ten someone will tune out, but that one last person will find some glimmer of enlightenment in, and that, I think, is what it is all about.
