Song of the Road

Jacquie and I are still on the longest road trip we have ever taken together. At the end of January, we left our home in Jackson Heights in New York City to drive to Tucson, where we spent the month of February. Then we drove to Santa Rosa, California to undergo a medically-supervised fast at TrueNorth Health Center. My purpose was to overcome the Long COVID that has made me a semi-invalid for three years. So far, it appears to have worked. I will know better when my body finally regains all of its strength in a couple of months.  On the trip home, we stopped in Sedona, AZ. This was where our late son, Matt, took his family on their last vacation together. It was a special place to him. I’ve been writing an essay in order to understand for myself what this trip has meant to me and to us. Maybe I will publish something more about it later. However, in the midst of that writing I wrote about the experience below. It makes me smile. I hope you will, too. 

One measure of the soulfulness of this journey home –a funny one, is that I’ve had a playlist running in my head all through the trip.

– It began at the Golden Gate Bridge with Tony Bennett singing about leaving his heart in San Francisco. 

– Then I heard America (the band, not the country)  singing “Ventura highway, where the days are longer and the nights are stronger than moonshine.”  . .

– That led to Dionne Warwick asking, “Do you know the way to San Jose?” 

– All through the desert from Pasadena across Arizona and New Mexico, I heard the Sons of the Pioneers looking for “Cool water, clear water . . . water!” 

– As we drove across the incredibly flat, yellow-colored plains around Amarillo, I heard Roy Drusky longing for childhood when “the days stretched out before me like a long, long Texas road.”  And also, as we drove across the panhandle I heard George Strait singing, “All my exes live in Texas.” (I’m sure that, if I had any exes,  I would want them to live in Texas — it would serve them right!) 

– Oklahoma brought on Gene Pitney ’s,  “I was only 24 hours from Tulsa.”

– From Arizona through Missouri we kept criss-crossing “historic route 66” as the signs called it. That, of course, brings up the “de de-de dum-dum” of Nelson Riddle’s theme from the TV show and Nat King Cole singing, “You’ll get your kicks on route 66.”  (Or, as one billboard put it, “You’ll get your kitsch on route 66.”) 

But, as we entered Missouri, the music stopped for awhile. As Jacquie said, the landscape from here on east is familiar. Indeed, until we hit the hills of  Appalachia where we grew up, it is all what I call, “Ohiowa,” where we spent the largest part of our lives. That may be why I heard, “I want to go home. Oh, how I want to go home!” If “Detroit City” is the buckle of the Rust Belt, Cleveland is about 3 punch holes to the right.

But, “home” isn’t Cleveland nor is it Bobby Bare’s beloved cotton fields – it is New York City.

I know some of you reading this don’t even want to visit New York, much less live there. But we are all different. 

New Yorkers are born all over the country, and then they come to New York City and it hits them: Oh, that’s who I am.”

Della Ephron

That’s me. I grew up on a dairy farm about as far from New York City as you can get geographically and culturally and still be in New York State, but every time I walk in the streets of Jackson Heights, the world’s most diverse neighborhood, I say (as Jacquie will attest) “I love it here.” As we left Ohio yesterday morning, I heard Frank Sinatra singing: “Start spreading the news! I’m leaving today! I want to be a part of it, New York, New York!” 

Perhaps the purpose of pilgrimage, as T. S. Elliott, G. K. Chesterton, and so many others have said, is to come back to where you began and to see the place for the first time.

Or, as Dorothy Parker put it: “When you leave New York, you see how clean the rest of the country is. Clean isn’t enough.”