by

I, like most others, rush along the freeway, intent on but one thing.

Getting to where I’m going is my only aim.

A place, a person, a goal I’ll find, that’s why I rush ahead.

I care little of where others go or why they race alongside me down the endless freeways.

But, today I took a little drive, yes with a goal in mind.

Yet, today, there was no desperate rush to get there and as swiftly return.

Instead of five miles over, I drove a few under and was transported back to the early days of my driving life. Driving before the endless freeways existed.

I noticed things I’d always miss, as I went toward some actually not too important destination. Today, I had the slower speed and not the need to hurry. So I drove along looking around at things about.

An older car on the grassy shoulder, a tire flat and the sides dented by numerous confrontations with what? I thought about the poor soul condemned to driving such a heap due to his or her economic status in our society.

Then I saw what one who drives a lot passes on most any day and, with which I have little thought; a pickup truck of a house painter. The bed of the truck held two windblown men, their hair flapping about their faces. A ten foot stepladder hung on the side of a wrack that held at least six extension ladders atop. The windblown souls surrounded by various tools and paint cans, many having been opened with paint dribbles down their sides. Spilled paint of many colors had ran down the rear bumper of the elderly truck and formed a Dali, or a Degas masterpiece, a gallery for other motorists if they took the time to notice. The sides of the bed were as adequately decorated with masterpieces of splattered, spilled paints. My thoughts went back to the days of kindergarten, when we did scribble drawings; scribble lines all over a sheet of paper, then try to find an object within the lines of scribbles.

A lady shoots past me in an SUV, totally intent on her cell phone conversation, which she could have easily completed before taking to the death filled freeway, with it’s ghosts of souls killed screaming at her, "PUT THAT THING DOWN AND DRIVE!" I wondered if there were young children aboard, too small to see above the Deluxe "leather at no extra charge" seats. I thought about the numerous television news reports right here in my own back yard about children dying in SVU rollovers, because they were not buckled into their child seat properly. The thought hit me one more time, How could parents be so irresponsible with the safety of their children?

Along one stretch of the freeway, men in jail uniforms picked up trash thrown out the window by inconsiderate trashy drivers and their passengers. I wondered what all they found in the deep unmowed grass. How much of it was repulsive to handle? What had these orange clad people done to deserve jail?

I reached my destination and realized I almost always utilized the hundreds of miles of freeways, seeing only the many shopping centers and businesses that totally fill the access roads and at least the first block or two of any major street running away from the freeway. Since I was in no particular hurry, I decided to take the hard, traffic-light-filled streets of the city to return home. I found not much had changed along this route, as compared to the ever outward growing thicket of brick and mortar of the freeways.

The old bridge no longer in use traversing the main rail lines through town still stands, barricaded and dangerous, but to the eye of someone from yesteryear, beautiful.  Built back in the eighteen hundreds, this iron structure, like so many of the bridges of my youth, has a planked deck, where horses once pulled wagons of commerce and buggies of passengers across the railroads below. The railroads are still in use, but the old bridge has been closed for many years, its iron girders and braces a beautiful, yet dangerous, rust-encased bit of art, not capable of carrying today’s traffic. At the foot of the bridge sat two homeless men, their requisitioned shopping cart filled with all their worldly goods. Again, I wondered what brought them to this place in this time in their situation and I smiled at the old TV show where it was announced, "There are a million such stories in the city."

I pass by the former home of a major music company, where I once entered to find a particular sheet of long outdated music. One of the older ladies working there assured me they had the sheet music, but it would take a while to find. No computers in their store to tell them exactly where to find anything. Nope, this was a job of looking through shelf after shelf of files to find what I was looking for. She said she would call when she had it in hand, which she did two weeks later. Now, that old, old company has moved to a gleaming new building of glass and chrome, you guessed it, alongside a major freeway. Everything is in their computer files, I would guess. There is no longer that musty, yet beautifully nostalgic smell about their business. Computers and Pledge have destroyed it all.

A man stands on a major corner with a cardboard sign; "Homeless and Hungry. Please help! God Bless." As I look at the bearded, long straggly haired, dumpy looking person, wondering why he can’t get some kind of work rather than beg for money on a street corner, he quickly folds the cardboard at the pre-placed crease and starts to walk across the street in front of me, where I am stopped for the light. A police car has approached and stopped next to me. I chuckle at the fact that the man doesn’t want the policeman to see him panhandling. Is he someone with a good reason not to talk to the police? Is he from another city where they might require a panhandler’s permit and he doesn’t have one? I think that most likely, many of the homeless people are in their situation due to circumstances beyond their control. But an able-bodied man? Reminds me of the hoboes who came to our poor house next to the Wabash railroad back at the end of the Second World War. They were destitute due to a lack of employment opportunities. It seemed, as poor as we were, there was always something to give them to eat.

As I leave the business area and enter the poorer neighborhood through which I must travel on this off-freeway journey, a small dog is walking along the side of the street, looking longingly at each car that passes, no doubt seeking the one with which he is familiar – the one that dumped him in someone else’s neighborhood when they no longer wanted that cute puppy grown into a full sized nuisance.

An old man walks slowly along the side of the street, no sidewalk to protect him from traffic. He is stooped of stature and wears suspenders to support the pants which he has grown out of, due to thinning with age. He has a cane in one hand and a small bag from a convenience store in the other. I wonder why he has to walk to the store. Has he no family to gather his needs of old age?

As I turn onto a semi-major street, lined with businesses, I’m appalled at the clutter and pollution. Every business along the way seems to vie for their sign to be the one you see. It seemed there were hundreds of signs, atop poles, on the temporary (for years) a-frame type devices, windows spattered with hand painted signs and banners. Delivery trucks proclaiming the attributes of the particular business in front of which they parked. And everywhere, the hapless starlings scurry about the parking lots and street sides in search of a morsel some trashy person threw out the window, tiny remnants of their fast food meal. The starlings must taste test all the trash that accompanies these morsels when they are tossed out on the street.

As I drove northwestward and entered the more affluent neighborhoods, I wondered at the two, three and four late model cars, pickups, suvs parked in many driveways. How could they afford all those? One for dad to race down the freeway each day? One for mom to do the same thing? One purchased for the sixteen year old son for his birthday and is likely to be totaled before his seventeenth? One for the college freshman daughter to drive to school? How could they afford the insurance?

I supposed they saved money by buying one of the box-on-top-of-a-box, plain, shoddily built homes that seem to proliferate all over the north side of town, built by unscrupulous builders. I wondered at how the city could let them build such inferior dwellings, which in many ways didn’t even come near complying with the city building codes. Might it have something to do with graft at city hall?

Then, as I reached the last leg of my journey home, I once again swore at the stupid asses at city hall for allowing these builders to destroy a beautiful four lane street which I travel to get home. It has been cut into to reach sewer and water lines to accommodate these sprawling subdivisions and improperly patched so many times, it is now like driving in open rocky country, the likes of which most cars are not designed to handle.

Finally, I pull into our two car driveway in front of our two people, one bunny rabbit and two dog home. Oh, I almost forgot the two wrens, the female of which is completely bald, her head denuded of feathers by the overanxious-to-reproduce male. Anyway, I sigh in relief at once more being home, my favorite place to be these days. Here, I can put up with the whiny dogs wanting something or another and the incessant singing of the male wren, happy in his endeavors to procreate, because here, I am king of the road and do not have to worry about a cell phone laden SUV killing me, or some idiot running a light in front of me, or any of the perils outside my front door. Here, I can sit at the computer creating things I hope people will enjoy reading.

Yes, it is an interesting world out there, but here, on the internet, I can judge people only by what they say on messenger and in their emails and they can judge me the same way. One might ask if the person half-way around the world is male or female, or if they work or go to school, or if they are married or single, but there is little in the way of questions like, are you black or white, pretty or ugly, educated or uneducated and all the questions upon which we judge people when we meet them in the flesh. These people have the same troubles, pride, interests, mates, children as those running down the freeway at breakneck speed, but they cannot kill me, nor abuse me nor do me harm. Here, I can delete them, ignore them or make long lasting friends of them. I think my next drive will be at the speed of light, right here at my keyboard.

As we rush about our lives and see little of our fellow man, we perhaps get into the same rut as those we ignore. Today’s world seems to be in one mad rush to get somewhere as quickly and as anonymously as possible. So, take a little drive and look around at the things old and new, the people around you - the way they are. And smile at the foibles we humans seem to create for ourselves. Take a little drive, as if you had all the time in the world to get to your destination. You’ll enjoy it.  By the way, the title of the music on this page is Home Sweet Home