Backing Up The Memories

After writing that last entry, I had to go back to my old journals to see what I had recorded about the year I wrote about. This is so funny! Here I am, almost thirty years later, waxing nostalgic about how this was the best time of my life…. But apparently it didn’t look like it back then:

7/26/75 (One week after my twentieth birthday) "…Since I’ve been out of school, things have gone from bad to worse to awful to unbearable, with varying degrees of disaster in between." I was referring to my initial forays into the male-female relationship market, most of which were total disasters. (At this time I was only about a month past the disastrous finish of the latest contest.) And the fact that I had been fired from my job.

10/3/75 (Six weeks into our "wonderful" eight week trip) "…And so my observations and experiences of the past six weeks and a day have brought me to a conclusion—I want to go home. Or, at least, I want to have the things that home offers. I [want] the rest of my clothes, my own bed, my records…roots, familiarity, a sense of belonging… It’s an adjustment I can’t make, to immerse myself in someone else’s lifestyle because there isn’t the space or the opportunity to exercise my own…" (We were staying at my grandfather’s house at the time.. Though he was a sweet old man, he WAS an old man…)

Oy, could I whine back then! I had refined it to an art! I realize that it is the perspective of the years that makes me understand the pure value of those months, and those trips. It was the "free-est" time of my life. Even though I kept screwing up, in the love department and the "getting along with others" department, and suffering for my screw-ups. And, now that it’s been twenty years since the last time we drove across country, I know that I would be in the car, seatbelt on and map in hand, before you could say "road trip." If only we had the time. If only…