Traveling reflections 3: Reminiscing on the road
In my rearview mirror there's a motorcycle, pretty far out, so that bike and rider are shadows shimmering in the heat coming off the highway. Standing out from the shadow, front and center, the bike's headlamp is a pearl above the blacktop. The cycle rides dead center of the three lanes, and behind, directly and to either side, come the cars silently pouring over the hill, and I think to myself, looking forward to the sky opening over the road ahead then back again to the rearview mirror, I don't remember this exactly, but I feel like I do, maybe I saw something like it in a movie.
I'm in the back seat, in the car with three other people. Music plays through the small speakers recessed in the doors. Each of us in the car knows the song, something epic with screaming guitars and a chorus to sing along to, loudly, and the sound of it fills the afternoon strip mall landscape as it goes rushing by. We pull into a parking lot, stop the engine and the music with it, get out of the car, hear the sounds of other traffic and parking cars, walk across the lot to go ask for donuts and coffee under fluorescent light that outshines the sun. Then it's back to the car with the music that picks up right where we left off, so that it's hard to imagine that we ever left this little space, though we've got the donuts and coffee to prove it. Still the memory is dubious.
We take a long train ride, pass along the coast, see the ocean stretch away, pass harbors here and there and small towns. We get to our destination, a bigger town, and we're met by friends in a car who take us to pick up a couple things, like bread. But there's no bakery in this town. We drive through the center, one or two streets with bars and performing arts spaces and brick buildings but no bakery. We drive a long way out on the state route, and across from the mall there's a bunch of stores and one of them, in a building that looks like a big plastic house or a place that sells carpets, is the bakery. We drive the same way back almost to the train station, because that's where the apartment is, where it's been the whole time, and I see a bakery across the street but it's gone out of business. I think to myself I don't ever remember a town without a bakery.
I'm in the back seat, in the car with three other people. Music plays through the small speakers recessed in the doors. Each of us in the car knows the song, something epic with screaming guitars and a chorus to sing along to, loudly, and the sound of it fills the afternoon strip mall landscape as it goes rushing by. We pull into a parking lot, stop the engine and the music with it, get out of the car, hear the sounds of other traffic and parking cars, walk across the lot to go ask for donuts and coffee under fluorescent light that outshines the sun. Then it's back to the car with the music that picks up right where we left off, so that it's hard to imagine that we ever left this little space, though we've got the donuts and coffee to prove it. Still the memory is dubious.
We take a long train ride, pass along the coast, see the ocean stretch away, pass harbors here and there and small towns. We get to our destination, a bigger town, and we're met by friends in a car who take us to pick up a couple things, like bread. But there's no bakery in this town. We drive through the center, one or two streets with bars and performing arts spaces and brick buildings but no bakery. We drive a long way out on the state route, and across from the mall there's a bunch of stores and one of them, in a building that looks like a big plastic house or a place that sells carpets, is the bakery. We drive the same way back almost to the train station, because that's where the apartment is, where it's been the whole time, and I see a bakery across the street but it's gone out of business. I think to myself I don't ever remember a town without a bakery.
posted by General Bird at 23:32
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