94 is as straight a drive as it ever was. Even the rental car feels the muscle memory seeping from my hands into the wheel. Midway, near St.Cloud, at the sign for Pleasureland, I’m supposed to call my mom. To give her a time frame of my arrival, plus the added bonus of saying and being in a place of “Pleasure” — (what better place to mark one’s travel?).
And she’s supposed to answer. Giggle even. And I’ll giggle. And oh, the pleasure indeed, this anticipation. And I’m supposed to sing along to the radio for the next 60 miles. Call at the exit for Alexandria, asking if she needs any essentials — and by essentials, meaning something from Walgreens, like jelly beans. And even though I’ve done it my whole life, she’s supposed to remind me to look through the bags to get the ones with the most reds, and yellow next, because she still likes yellow… And I will do it, calling when I’ve secured the goods. And she’s supposed to recall the time we traveled to Washington State with my Grandma Elsie in tow, and how we only shared with her the purple and black ones, and we’ll laugh, and she’ll say, “but she likes them,” and we’ll laugh again because who could like them and because we know we’re really only taking the ones we like.
But the hole in my heart where all the supposed tos live, grows wider and wider as I drive the Main Street, with no special place to go in my hometown. But I do need water. And the Walgreens is right there. So I pull over and go inside. Put the water on the counter. “Are you a rewards member?” They will ask, just as they are supposed to. We used to be, I say. (As I was always supposed to use my mother’s phone number so she would earn more points and I would get the better price.) I type in her old phone number on the keypad. The number that hasn’t been hers for two years. “It still works,” the clerk says. Just as it is supposed to, I think and smile.
Thomas Wolfe writes in Look Homeward, Angel — “We are always looking for revelation—even in our most known places and our most loved people. We hope to find the undiscovered in ourselves—the window into everything.”
My mother always finds me. Lives within me. I travel on.
