And they walked off to look for America

I grew up in a military family which meant, for me, cumulative days and weeks driving between duty stations with my two little brothers, our dog, and whichever cat was lowering himself to abide with us for the time being. We were all in the backseat, filed together side by side but not very neatly. A row of elbows and knobby knees, one of us on the hump of a white Pinto wagon or, later, a red Volvo station wagon.

Entertainment was limited in the 1970s and early 80s, driving from Virginia to California to Maine to South Carolina and points south. So this was our catalog:

1. We had two Superscope story tapes. Superscope Storyteller presents: Moses in Egypt and The Adventures of Spiderman,

2. We also liked to sing The Gambler by Kenny Rogers with lyrics we made up each time (and laughed uproarously over),

3. We liked to sing Don't Go Breakin' My Heart with Elton John and Kiki Dee,

But mostly we listened to:

4. The Mamas and the Papas Greatest Hits,

5. Simon and Garfunkel's Concert in Central Park, and 

6. Zero Mostel, in a production of Fiddler on the Roof.

Tevye: Rabbi, is there a blessing for the Czar? 

Rabbi (singing): May God bless and keep the Czar...FAR AWAY FROM US! 

Not a bad catalog. Though I do remember one of us asking my dad, "Who is Ed Koch and who are 'the guys sellin' loose joints?'"

Rolling along, I read all of the Little House books and Narnia books a hundred times each, or a thousand, when I wasn't snoozing from Dramamine. I was a bookish, very shy, easily-carsick girl born into a traveling family. (By the time I graduated from high school I had attended ten schools.)

There is a special mental state you reach when you are bored of being bored. A Boredom Rubicon is crossed. Born of resignation, resolution, but call it magic, for I would lean my cheek on the vinyl window bumper and stare out at the sky -- a clear blue endless day, a rainy roof of grey, a whiteout blizzard in Iowa, a midnight sky full of a spray of stars big and bright. California dreamin'

I saw Half Pint trundling across a prairie in her wagon in a calico dress, and Pa shouldering his way through a blizzard to feed the horses. I saw the Children of Israel pulling carts across the yellow sand and water spilling from the rock. I saw Lucy in the snowy woods, and Caspian turning his ship away from the long blue wave on the Silver Sea to go back and marry the star's daughter. Kindred spirits, I imagined, all of us -- Moses, and me, and Caspian the Seafarer.

Sunrise, Sunset.

So we all rolled along to the tune of the traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway or my brothers' action figures shooting each other. In between the battles and songs and stories, I told my little brothers my own invented, wandering story that re-commenced with each new road trip. It was a story about some kids who found an ancient, secret door in a gnarly tree, which led to a secret tunnel under the road, which led to a secret room, which led to adventures.

In some of the adventures, there was a Gila Monster. ("...and that's when they turned the corner and came upon THE HEELAH MONSTER!")

My dad had introduced us to The Gila Monster into his own "Billy Boy" story series -- concoctions initially developed to keep us amused on the exceedingly bleak and ominous day two of the five day trip to Arlington, Virginia from Monterey, California. My brothers and I imagined him as some kind of bloody-mawed, man-eating Godzilla. (So imagine our surprise and amusement when, much later, we learned that gila monsters are small, harmless lizards in the American southwest. Not even Japanese!)

On the road, my brothers asked occasionally If There Are Sharks In That Big River (fresh water disqualification was not really absorbed, for perhaps hope sprang eternal) and How Deep Is That Bay and How Long Until We Get to the Motel. My brothers were always asking about sharks, alligators, snakes, and bears which, they sincerely hoped, lived in the woods by the highways were were driving down.

They also were keenly interested in the depths of the bodies of water over which we passed on bridges. Dad obliged by thoughtfully and confidently making up the answer right out of thin air. "Oh hmmm, let's see. I believe that river is about 50, maybe closer to 55 feet deep at this point."

I eventually fell asleep to my parents comforting, murmuring grown-up conversation, waking up crick-necked and drooling in the McDonalds parking lot or the rest area off of some turnpike.

It makes sense that at some point in middle school I decided the following: The theme song for my life shall be "America," by Simon and Garfunkel.

"America" is a somehow both soaring and pensive traveling song about people and places. It builds a big picture from small things. (I have only reluctantly forgiven Bernie Sanders for co-opting it for his campaign.) It also seemed slightly and deliciously rebellious for me to choose it, because it mentions cigarettes.

It also has the gait, somehow, of a highway song. Do you know what I mean? Some songs have this, not in exactly the same way as each other, but they do. "Driver 8" is a highway song, "Africa" is, too -- not just because of the words, because of the indefinable traveling song-ness of the sound and rhythm. Like wheels thrumming steadily on pavement. Things by Gordon Lightfoot are sometimes traveling songs. "Rocky Mountain High," by John Denver, is a traveling song, and "Country Roads." "Walk on the Ocean" by Tode the Wet Sprocket. There are others.

Anyway, my middle school real estate was in my bag. My bag was a purple Le Sac with a novel, some Trident gum, some Bonne Bell gloss or Cover Girl Frosted Peach lipstick, a retainer, my allowance, a notebook with my friends' addresses from the last place we lived.

That was then. This is now.

In three weeks I move again, this time to Pittsburgh. I have never lived there.

I am 45 and married to a civilian, but he has been a traveling man, as well. If you count the three month stints in apartments waiting for homes, this will be my 30th move. If you don't, it will be my 25th.

It just so happens that the traveler in the song boards a Greyhound bus in Pittsburgh. For some, maybe this means nothing. But, for me, it means that, at age 45, I'm not quite done looking for America.

America

Let us be lovers, we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner's pies
And we walked off to look for America

Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I've gone to look for America

Laughing on the bus, playing games with the faces
She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy
I said, be careful, his bowtie is really a camera

Toss me a cigarette, I think there's one in my raincoat
We smoked the last one an hour ago
So I looked at the scenery
She read her magazine
And the moon rose over an open field

Cathy, I'm lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I'm empty and aching and I don't know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike
They've all come to look for America

All come to look for America
All come to look for America

Read more: Simon And Garfunkel - America Lyrics | MetroLyrics 

"Centireading"

"After a hundred reads, familiarity with the text verges on memorisation – the sensation of the words passing over the eyes like cud through the fourth stomach of a cow. Centireading belongs to the extreme of reader experience, the ultramarathon of the bookish, but it’s not that uncommon. To a certain type of reader, exposure at the right moment to Anne of Green Gables or Pride and Prejudice or Sherlock Holmes or Dune can almost guarantee centireading. Christmas is devoted to reading books we all know perfectly well. The children want to hear the one story they have heard so many times they don’t need to hear it again."

On reading a book 100 times -- a good writer writes about reading Hamlet and Wodehouse,

Centireading Force:why reading a book 100 times is a great idea

As a Navy kid who attended 10 schools, I found reading and re-reading and re-reading certain books formed a groove in my mind of friendly kinship and "place" that eluded me in my constantly-changing school social circles. These books helped me translate my experiences from the vantage point of a wanderer in good company.

I saw myself as the adventuring outsider, watching mountains and plains and woods and cities roll by the car window on 80 or 95 or the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Though a skinny American girl living in the 1970s and 80s, I felt I related directly with the Pevensies and the Ingalls of Narnia, Cambridge, and the woods and prairies of 19th century America -- not the Middletons of Charleston or the Donovans of Maine or the Smiths of Virginia. I can quote the Narnia books and the Little House books like I can quote the Bible, yea, in time of need.

Later, as an adult living in Shanghai, when the strangeness of that glittering and odd city felt heavy and chemical, and like walking in a backwards world upside down, I turned frequently to Wodehouse to recall something warmly organic, a comfortable friendship, the mollifying lightness of old jokes shared again. And also therein recalled a world that presumes we are all, occidental and oriental, at least a little bit nuts.

In this except from the article, the author reflects on Jeeves and Hamlet (and why not?) as an expat Canadian boy in England: 

"Every Sunday, my family would load ourselves into a car – my father, my mother, my kid brother and I – and drive out more or less randomly to see what England had to offer. In western Canada where I grew up, it had been perfectly standard to cross three or four hours of prairie to visit a relative for lunch. From Cambridge, an hour in any direction would land us in a church from the reign of Queen Anne, unspeakably ancient to our new world eyes, or some grand estate, the luxury of the residence always offset by the cheapness of its gift shops, always reeking of scones and plastic guidebooks, or the ruin of some abbey, the stuff of mossy legends. During these trips, in the tiny English car, we would listen to cassettes of The Inimitable Jeeves, read by Jonathan Cecil.

The psychology of my love for The Inimitable Jeeves isn’t exactly hard to understand. As we rolled through that strange country, laughing at the English with the English, the family was both inside and outside. My associations with The Inimitable Jeeves are as powerful as they could possibly be, a fused sense of family unity and childhood adventure. The book is so much more than just a happy childhood memory. In such ways, books pick us, rather than the other way around.

The main effect of reading Hamlet a 100 times was, counter-intuitively, that it lost its sense of cliche. 'To be or not to be' is the Stairway to Heaven of theatre; it settles over the crowd like a slightly funky blanket knitted by a favorite aunt. Eventually, if you read Hamlet often enough, every soliloquy takes on that same familiarity. And so 'To be or not to be' resumes its natural place in the play, as just another speech. Which renders its power and its beauty of a piece with the rest of the work."