Fog

December 7, 2006

Oliver turned two months old yesterday…and yet, it feels like he’s been around longer than that.

The other night during That Special Time that he and I share that usually falls in the 3:00 or 4:00a.m. timeframe and lasts for an hour or two, it dawned on me that I average about four hours of sleep a night compared to the desired eight. So basically, I’ve GAINED an additional four hours a day. Multiply that times the sixty or so days he’s been dazzling my life and you’ve got 240 hours or approximately ten days. So maybe that’s why I feel like he’s been around longer or perhaps it’s just because of this weird fog I’ve been in probably due to the lack of sleep. I say “weird” because I don’t feel like I’m in it til I look back on it. Seeing Kathi the other night, I remember thinking, “She looks really great” then because I think it, I get this weird assumptive feeling that I also tell her and it’s not til I download the pictures and see her that I realize I only thought it. You may think this is just average dinginess but it can get worse to some degree.

Before we began The Road Trip, I was talking to my brother Matt about our path and I told him how it would be great to just swing down and see him but him being in Boca Raton is “just a little” out of the way. He told me about Amtrak’s auto train, the only path it’s available is basically from Orlando, FL to Washington, D.C. (Sanford, FL to a little town in VA near D.C.). You literally drive onto the train (well, an Amtrak employee takes care of that part) and you pick what kind of “quarters” you want (family room for us, please) and you leave the rest to them. Suddenly seeing him & his lovely wife Theresa became feasible so I told him I’d look into it and off I ran with it….except I never actually told him I had ran with it so when I called him from the road to give him a general ETA, he responded, “You’re coming to Florida?” to which I heard a scream from Theresa in the background. Fortunately for my fog, their schedules allowed for it and we spent a blissful albeit ridiculously hot few days with them. Unfortunately for my fog, I didn’t take a single picture of either one of them holding Oliver. What the hell was I thinking?!? And now I regret that part immensely to the point that I’m thinking about printing a life-size pic of O and sending it to them so they can take pics of themselves with O’s representative.

If this trip has posed any questions it’s: Is the heat really a good reason to keep us from living anywhere? It hurt SO much to leave mine and Tommy’s families when we left TX and FL. These people NEED to be a part of O’s life but they all live in such hot places. Granted, we’re committed to CT for the next 3 years but after that we are going to have to do some figuring about where we should end up.

But I digress. Florida was wonderful even through the fog. Fortunately, Matt is still one of my best friends (and as an added bonus, he’s my brother thus making family holidays that much more pleasant) and he’s seen me at my worst (see Puberty – The Prince & Stevie Nicks years) so any sort of foggy demeanor rolls off his back (please oh please oh please let me be right about this). He and Theresa have a great house that is great mainly because of their own sweat and labor they’ve put into it. It was nice to just hang out there and was equally nice to take the water taxi around Lauderdale with them.

But as we left, I felt I didn’t spend near enough time with them…as I kind of do about all our stops along the way. Like we didn’t see any of Nashville aside from the Loveless Café & my cousin’s (though if and when I head back, the Loveless would still be my first stop) and we didn’t see more of Memphis aside from Graceland and the Cozy Corner (still two justifiably proper things to see, but still…hello? Sun Studios? The Peabody? The Grand Old Opry?). This speedy stop and go visits continued when we got to D.C. We went to the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural Hist

ory and Air & Space museums and saw the Washington Memorial from afar but that was it.

And yet, I don’t have many regrets. We’ve seen a lot and we’ve come to the last days of The Road Trip. As I type this, we’re headed to Teaneck, NJ to visit our friends Susan and Chris and finally get to meet their baby Dylan (and they can meet ours). As luck would have it, it’s Chris’s birthday and we hit a doozy of a $1.29 section at a truck stop so we were able to get a variety of delightfully crappy gifts.

So maybe the fog isn’t so foggy afterall.