It's easy to get caught up in the life of the road trip. The quintessential schedule bum. The "what day is it again?" lifestyle. The complete oblivious day-to-day comings and goings, where habit gets thrown out the window as you drive by. Morning means "before noon" on one day, and "before dawn" the next. It's easy to get caught up.
Which makes it so very hard to catch up with the real world. (No, not the MTV show, where life consists primarily of resisting the urge to cheat on your partner, failing to resist, and then complaining wildly about how it wasn't really your fault and you hate this stupid house anyway.)
I count this as Day Five of the road rats miss the real world. We're parked at the Commmunity Pride grocery store in the heart of Richmond, Virginia, waiting (hoping, praying, wishing) for our friend J-Dog to call. He just re-stationed here from Santa Cruz, started med school, and is already up to his eyeballs in the books. He's probably at the library now, his message machine blinking fruitlessly, unnoticed.
We tried this, as I mentioned on four other occasions. One, a date with an island in Maine that B's great great great etc. uncle had owned...a gift from the indians way back when. Two, an almost-miss with a childhood friend, Ali in NYC, which our refrigerator tried to sabotage by breaking when full of food. (We swung back around and made the hook-up, though, despite cranky appliances.) Three, the perpetual inability to devise a date to meet with Angel from California, regardless of location, timeframe, or Priceline availability. Four, our recent (and most tragic) swat in the dark in Stamford, Connecticut, where Jeff the Man was less than a few miles away from our parking lot home and despite all the modern technology we couldn't make the connection. And now, on the eve of Day Five of "never the two shall meet," we are hoping that we can beat the odds and hook up with J-Dog.
So, in order of appearance, our plea to our friends in the real world:
- Please forgive us for not being very conducive to planned events
- Please forgive us for showing up unannounced
- Please forgive us for moving on too quickly
- Please, oh J-Dog, give us a call so that we may redeem ourselves from the depths of planning retardation!
