I wonder when I wander home
If I’ll be fit to
drink alone.
Sleep with my memories,
Pictures, apologies.
For every minute yesterday,
Regret reminds me anyway.
If I remember anything,
I’ll make mistakes again.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
Thought I was losing you.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
I fell in love with you.
I will declare a holiday,
the night that she turned me away.
I’m
drowning in my miseries
It solves everything.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
Thought I was losing you.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
I fell in love with you.
With you.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
Thought I was losing you.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
I fell in love with you.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
Thought I was losing you.
Last night on the
Mass Pike,
I fell in love with you.
- the Get Up Kids
Massachusetts is two hours across. Almost exactly. If you push the car at 70 and don't account for traffic in Boston and if you don't spend too much time scrutinizing the pilgrim hats on the green exit signs. I've made the trek on the Pike more times than I can count and more of my stories than I'd like to admit were generated on the oft-excavated asphalt of its 135-mile length. Although I'm not going to let the backhoe loose on my life right now, I will dig up a few of the most resonant artifacts:
Between Westfield and Lee is a thirty-mile stretch of road. There are no exits, no rest stops. In the winter the Berkshires that surround this piece of highway get snowy, and you must be very careful pushing your car past swerving eighteen-wheelers whose slushy wake coats your windshield as soon as you creep near. This is where you lose NPR or any other station and rely on tapes or internal monologues to carry you through. I usually relied on both. This is where I shed my tears, lost my faith, and wrote my poems. Whichever direction I was headed, east or west, this is where I knew I was going home.
I once swerved off the road on a sleety night, making the journey from Plainville to Bard, when my windshield wipers decided to give out on me. Reduced to driving 30 miles an hour in a 65 mile per hour zone, I thrust my head out the window and tried to manually operate the wipers. No luck. After driving several miles in this ridiculous fashion, I finally reached an exit. In Palmer I found a small bed and breakfast, yellow, unassuming, the only inn between the conference center extravaganzas of Worcester and the hospitality centers for the parents of college students in the Amherst/Springfield area. The owner is a very nice man, but you might not catch him there. Even if you ring the bell. Even if you ring the bell several times in the pouring rain. Where you might catch him is where I caught him, fortunately, (inches away from grinning evil death in the form of a slick Massachusetts road) at the Cumberland Farms down the street, buying ice cream for his wife. He’ll give you a room, and promise you a wake-up call, even if it’s one in the morning, even if you are a drenched puppy with matted hair, even if you barely look old enough to drive.
Christina makes me a mix. We haven’t seen each other in two years but our friendship is nearing the fifteen-year mark. So two years apart is a drop in the bucket I tell myself. Christina puts this song on the mix for me. If there is anything Christina and I have in common, it is our common history; shaped by the suburbs of Massachusetts, we spent the greater part our teenage years battling mall culture and urban sprawl. Talking the other day, for the first time in months, Christina and I reminisce about the time after we’d finally left the cesspool of the suburbs, the time when we started taking the Mass Pike to our respective colleges. We remember how the 2 hours on the Pike represented a crossing of space, a traversing of the chronological distance between youth and burgeoning adulthood. We think about how relationships factored into that journey and she tells me about all the boys that marked those years for her, all of those relationships that came and went and pushed her farther into maturity. I tell her “that’s the memory, embedded in my head, of such a particular time. We were traveling back and forth between lives. Always a shedding of the skin to travel that road. Always someone under the rubber of the tires.” “Yeah,” she says, still understanding after all these years, “mileage in so many forms.”