Hamburgers on Hard Rolls

Every Saturday afternoon my grandmother's friends would come over to play bridge. Norma would drive, ferrying Evelyn and Lydia to the house on Savoy Street.

And every Saturday afternoon they would have hamburgers on hard rolls with Bermuda onions.

My grandmother, it turns out, lived a very stable life, filled with ritual and habit. Three times a day she bathed her mother-in-law in tar to fight back a skin problem severe enough to kill her. Lunch time she sat down around the table with her husband and two daughters. Saturday she played bridge.

Saturday was available because my grandfather worked, as he worked Monday through Friday and part of Sunday. My grandmother was alone much of the time. My mother attributes her mother's sense of independence, strong female friendships, and women-only adventures to that fact alone. If she could have been with her husband, she would have. Since she couldn't, she made other choices.

Which reminds me again how easy our lives are, comparatively. We laud the accomplishments of immigrants, but we forget how hard they work, and worked. My grandfather, whose father sold cheese in a tiny village in Southern Italy, grew to be a prosperous man. But he worked so hard he only shared supper with his family once a week. Other nights, he'd have the sandwich my grandmother made for him when he came home long after dark.

In the meantime, my grandmother played bridge.

We were close to Oatman and famished

Forgive me, but that line keeps coming back to me -- Close to Oatman, Close to Oatman, Close to Oatman. Famished.

It seemed one of the longer days of the trip, that endless stretch from Los Angeles suburban strip malls to this empty desert road where jackrabbits dart into the hillsides. Kirk and I had already stopped for directions at the Moabi Marina, where people vacationed in the 114-degree heat. Water sports on the Colorado River in the middle of the desert. A humvee hauling a boat through the dun.

And then the town that wasn't a town, on the way to Oatman, the town that wasn't yet a town back when Olive Oatman was kidnapped by the Yavapai Indians, then sold to the Mohave. Bought back five years later, she wore Mohave tattoos on her face for the rest of her life.

Inside the Silver Dollar the crack of pool balls made Kirk jump. Inside Linda's Cafe, one man said to another, "I was going to ask you if you had a 77." No food makes more sense than hamburgers in a place like this, than french fries and iced tea amid the valances decorated with the Route 66 emblem.

What made the boy who asked for ice water storm out, leaving the door open behind him? What made the owner, serving us, blurt out, "Have you ever seen a fry that big before?"

The boy will grow up to be a violent man. Kirk and I will probably never drive this stretch of deserted highway again. Few will remember that in its earliest incarnation, Oatman was named Vivian. When we get there, the signs say open, though everything's closed.

Cameras Were Bigger Back Then

There I am, off to see the world. It was 1993. I was just shy of 25. I was a marketing research analyst in Charlotte, North Carolina, a handful of years out of college and even fewer off a divorce. I hadn't really been anywhere.

I pulled out the photo album this morning. A month in Europe by myself, a loose itinerary that had me going into London and out of Frankfurt, not a single hotel reservation along the way.

While it's tempting to laugh at my Birkenstocks-and-socks combo (and numerous other elements of the photo) I'm trying to get past that. Because I've pulled it out for other reasons. Something incipient in that photo. A different way of being--one that put a priority on away over home--was being born. But at that moment, I was just standing in my friend's driveway, ready for the airport.

(Before the trip, I remember my mother saying, "Are you excited?" and me answering, "Oddly, I don't really feel excited." She said, "You don't feel excited about much." It stuck. And it seemed true. How could I not be excited at 24? And was it during this trip that I rediscovered excitement?)

Traveling alone, traveling as a woman, choosing travel over other things more conventional, more safe, more responsible. These are the things I want to write about.

(I remember that New Year's, remember a friend staying the night and how she sat on my bedroom floor before going back out to the pulled-out couch. I was in bed. It was late. And I told her, "This year I'm going to go to Europe." It seemed so radical! These days I live in a world where someone is always going off to Europe, or Costa Rica, or Mexico, or India. But back then, the idea was full of daring. "Really?" She wanted to know more.)

By the next morning I was in Trafalgar Square. A few days later seeing The Merchant of Venice in Stratford-Upon-Avon. And then on a boat in the Lake District, off to find Wordsworth's Dove Cottage.



It was cold on the water. We were cruising.

The Art of the 23-Day Journey

How many hours were lost to reservation-making this past weekend? We are book for Italy this summer, a trip already distracting for all of the can't wait-ing around here. But something happened as I got my tickets together, moving the trip back by a day to save a few hundred dollars, figuring out when I'll be in Rome, Sicily, on the Adriatic.

I looked down at the Orbitz page awaiting my credit card and there it was: Total days=23.

Now I've been known to give too much emphasis to numbers, dates, and such things. But the fact that I'm writing a book about a 23-day journey and then taking a 23-day journey the following year--an entirely different journey--seems important to me. And Chris, not enamored with dates nor even (frankly) with synchronicity, added when I raced off to tell him, "Twenty-three is my birth day as well."

So there it is. Today, on paper, I'll ponder the art of the 23-day road trip.

And I'll ponder what it will mean for me to return to Rome 12 or 13 years later. It was in Rome that my traveler identity was solidified, in ways I'll tell at another time. And that identity is the one that sent me off on the road last year, hitting the Merritt Parkway in a rented Chevy Malibu with an American flag in the window.

And the freeze...

Winter returns to Austin (and everywhere else) this weekend, and I look out anxiously at my plants to see if anything fell to yesterday's sleet and diving temperatures.

It's Easter morning. Everything is green and moist and chill. I'll be heading to church.

My friend Jane visited this last week, sitting with me at a table at Austin Java and giving me writing exercises which landed Morris Dees at Yellowstone with me and evoked those promenading ladies and gentlemen from before the War, dressing in their finery for evenings at Old Faithful Inn.

We've purchased tickets for Italy and I am left to decide in which Adriatic town to spend my 39th birthday. We've also purchased one of those blow-up exercise balls, which will reside in the den. Chris says, "Have we really become those people?"

There are worse things to become.

Happy Easter.

Saturday: New Bike, a Little Ditty

It was to be a hyper-productive day, in which I finished taxes and planted columbine and romanced my sweetie, with whom I had my first date three years ago on-the-dot. So far, it hasn't turned out that way. But it isn't all lost.

I bought a bike today. I've been without a bike for a year or two, having sold my road bike to a friend training for the triathalon, in large part because I wanted something more equipped for the hike and bike trail and around-town rides. My old bike had been built for touring, and I'd bought it back when I imagined those long rides through the French hillsides that I've never taken.

So my new bike is simpler -- a Novara Metro -- a comfort bike with tires that handled my ride home from REI with ease. I used my 20 percent off coupon with some gusto.

And I wrote an essay to submit to the Channel Road Inn's writing contest. The winner gets a weekend at the inn, a lovely seaside spot in Santa Monica, which adds up to more than many of the places you can be published. I stayed there as a respite in the middle of my road trip, and I'd do it again. Besides, it's good practice to write about the trip in brief, related ways.

Tonight we head out for a celebratory dinner, perhaps at the new Sandra Bullock restaurant downtown because, well, why not?

Essay excerpt below. Happy Saturday.

It was Tuesday, June 27th, and I’d been traveling for 12 days. In a rented Chevy Malibu I’d sped across the Pennsylvania Turnpike, gotten lost in eastern Ohio, stayed awake across hundreds of miles of flat prairie in South Dakota. I’d crossed the Big Horns, the Virgin River Gorge, and the Mojave still shimmering with heat near midnight. I’d slept in sunken beds in motor courts and in bathroom-less cabins where bison roamed outside.

I was on the trail of my grandmother, Jennie Marrocco, who had traveled from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Los Angeles and back in 1946. Using her journal as my guide, I was re-creating her trip—which she made with three girlfriends—as exactly as I could 60 years later. I’d spent months in preparation tracking down the places she’d visited and the hotels she’d stayed in. My goal was to replicate her experience.

I thought Los Angeles would be the exception.

My grandmother had spent her nights in Southern California in Cucamonga, near San Bernardino, then a small farming and wine community. She slept in a “lovely cabin” and followed Route 66 into Los Angeles each day, where she visited Beverly Hills and the Chinese Theater and “loads of orange groves.” She’d sipped a cocktail at the Brown Derby, which she admitted was “not too hot.”

I could have stayed in Cucamonga myself, now named Rancho Cucamonga and a community of suburban California homes with red tile roofs. But the cabins would be long gone and the commute would have been a chaotic mix of concrete and traffic.

I chose to stay at the Channel Road Inn.

When I arrived, I was tired, achy, dizzy from travel. I needed the cookie sitting on the plate inside my cheerful room. I needed the note with my name on it, the sun flooding through the windows, the almond lotion in its tiny container in the bathroom. I needed the sense of ease contained in the fluffy comforter and the glasses for wine set out in the afternoon.

I used my nights at the Channel Road Inn to focus on quiet instead of adventure, recuperating instead of retracing.

On the second afternoon, I walked out the front door, took a right, followed a tunnel under the PCH, and ended up on the sand. I walked to the shore and stuck my toe in the water. When my grandmother had made it to California 60 years earlier, she had seen the Pacific for the first time. She’d traveled clear across the country to stand beside it. Doing so myself, I knew it was one of the few things that hadn’t changed.

Then I walked back to the inn. I looked at the historic photographs in frames in the living room, the details on the tiles of the elaborate fireplace. Although my grandmother had stayed 55 miles east, it was easy to see that staying at the inn was a more authentic way of re-creating her journey than staying at a chain hotel in Cucamonga ever could have been. This place, and the old California it so richly conjures up, would have been familiar to my grandmother in ways the strip shopping centers along Route 66 never could....

Pondering Authenticity

To the left of the entrance to the Peery Hotel in Salt Lake City is an ornate piece of carved wood furniture called the Bishop’s Desk. It basically dominates the seating area with its curves and glass plate windows and drawers and designs. I remember Chris looking at it as I got us checked into the hotel, sitting in a high-backed chair and staring.

The Bishop’s Desk is original, I was told by my Peery Hotel history expert, a friendly guy named Dave who had taken Utah history courses in college. What I realize now is that it may not have been original to the Peery. It may just be old. Which ruins my image of Jennie and her friends hanging out in chairs around the Bishop’s Desk discussing plans for the day, discussing cherry and apricot groves awaiting their visit.

What happened? I read the materials Dave gave me about the Peery and discovered that in its renovation in 1985 it was made newly elegant. Wouldn't you think the mahogany reception desk was original? The stained glass windows in the lobby? The embossed "Peery" in the front of the building? Only the last is original. The rest were added in the 1980s.

This has me pondering authenticity again, which is much different from pondering the act of re-creating as I was a few days ago. I'm sitting in a coffeehouse, relatively newly opened in Austin, calling itself Dominican Joe. I like it here, but I've been to the Dominican Republic. Several times. My father is married to a Dominican woman. This coffee house, despite its mission to support projects in that country, says little about the Dominican Republic. It says far more about funky South Austin in 2007. Does that make it inauthentic? Does the Bishop's Desk looming in the lobby of the Peery as if it's always been there, when perhaps it hasn't, become inauthentic because it may not have been there in 1910, in 1946?

And what if someone wanted to try to return to Dominican Joe 60 years from now? What if someone were trying to understand the morning of March 28 in my life?

They might find this building, Texas limestone embedded with fossilized sea shells, curving near the corner of Riverside Drive, though they also might not. But if they did, if sitting here 60 years from now was a cafe, a coffeehouse, someplace you could fill a mug and sit down, what would still be authentic about it? Not the Sarah MacLachlan on the stereo. Not the couple that just came in and grabbed coffee then took off on their bikes, her bike a sweet new women's style with flowers painted up the frame. Not the folding card table I sit at when the rest of the coffee house is filled with solid wood.

And what if every bit of that could be re-created? What if every detail was authentic? Then what? What if the newspapers still announced the Senate's vote to force a withdrawal from Iraq in 2008 and the Anna Nicole Smith autopsy results. What if all of it? It still wouldn't be this morning with the cell phone ring from the next table, with the man explaining to his Asian friend what a pumpkin is -- "I'll draw it for you. It's the Halloween vegetable."--with the refrigerator case with two elaborate cupcakes of pink and purple frosting that hums and then stops and then hums again.

I'll make the calls to learn more about the Bishop's Desk. But even if it turns out it was there, even if my grandmother ran her finger over its carved angels with their wavy hair and chubby thighs, even then the attempts at authenticity bump very quickly against their limits.

Awaiting Turnaround

When will I reach LA, dip my toes in the Pacific, and head back east? When? I have been writing and writing and I have yet to reach the Pacific. It might be easier to spring out of bed and to the project if I could just get headed back east. There things lightened up, burned clean by the heat of the Southwest sun.