Tuesday morning, not at school. Packing the car for a trip across the province (okay, not the whole province, but it feels like it,) to take care of my mom who is just getting out of convalescent care with a brand new knee.
Pack up, gas up, hit the road.
The brooding starts before I leave the gas station.
I can only stay a few days with my mom, will that be enough? How is she going to manage when I leave? We’re switching Gavin’s food, I wonder if it will help with the tummy upsets? I owe nine different people emails, I’ve got to reply to them. I haven’t written a blog post for this week and what am I going to do about my chapter ten problem? I hope my supply teacher showed up so they’re not shorthanded at school.
I can’t do this to myself for six hours. I hit the podcasts.
First up is BBC’s Desert Island Discs and Stephen Fry drives with me to Renfrew, distracting and delighting me with his thoughts on autobiographies, a life well lived and bipolar disorder. He chooses Bach and Wagner and Beethoven for his desert island. Beethoven’s late quartets are his favourites and now that I know that, I find I like him even more, which I didn’t think was possible.
“Everything about the world is astonishing,” he says and I drive by a line of cadmium yellow birches on a rocky ridge and think, he’s right. Why don’t we see that every minute of every day?
More Desert Island Discs. Dame Judy Dench is next in the rotation. She and the BBC lady talk about fear and Dame Judy says the trick about fear is to use it “like petrol” to fuel your performance. The sound of her voice when she talks about her late husband is heartbreaking. She chooses Miles Davis (whom she knew) and Billie Holiday (whom she heard sing live in San Francisco,) and a piece called Farewell to Stromness that is so beautiful it stops me in my tracks. This music and the fact that I am driving by sheep farms in the Addington Highlands now make me think about how very much I want to go to Scotland some day. Although if I ever go, I’m not sure I could leave again.
Going on a trip seems so attractive right now. Everything’s been so much work lately – I’ve got too many balls in the air, don’t drop them – even arranging for a supply teacher to cover my classes while I was away turned into a huge problem. And then in the midst of it, a balm – an email from my principal who said she would take care of everything. “Don’t worry about a thing,” she said. “Spend the time with your mom.”
I wonder if she knows how much that helped.
At Bancroft, I switch podcasts to Undecided, “a political podcast for millennials” – a group to which I absolutely do not belong.(What is the term for people born in 1964? The “Just a Little Too Late to Ride the Boomer Wave” Generation? Not very catchy, is it?) But even though I am not a millennial, the two millennials in question – Tara and Kate – are smart, funny, passionate and also happen to be two of my former students. I knew them both many, many years ago when they were eleven and you know what? They were smart and funny and passionate then, too.
We become who we are.
I listen to three episodes of Undecided and am alternately fascinated by what they have to say and very, very proud of them.
Just before Orillia, I switch to music and maybe it’s because I’m driving to my home town, but my Desert Island playlist is straight up memory lane: The Police, Dire Straights, Manhattan Transfer, Supertramp, the Nylons, everybody I loved when I was young. (And foolish? Nah. I was wise even when I was 19.)
And then I’m there.
I make a quick stop at the grocery store for the basics (gotta get bananas, mom always has a half banana with her toast in the morning) then I roll into my mom’s driveway at 4:47 p.m. Five hours 25 minutes, many podcasts and a whole lot of music later.
And only a little brooding.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” my mom says as she and her new knee slowly make their way to the door to greet me.
P.
P.S. What are your favourite podcasts these days? Share, please!