Anyone Can Whistle

Delights

Blue lines, green flecks, red numbers, black names. How I love pulling out my road atlas, poring over the places I've been and picking out new places to go--there's something about a map that just blasts the universe wide open for me. The world is my playpen now. I can go to any place in this whole book.
"So, what next?" I say. "This summer, I'm going to Lynden," I inform myself. Ok, Elaine, how do you want to get there? Well, Elaine, maybe I'll take the interstates most of the way. Real quicklike, you know. Or, maybe I'll jaunt down through Yellowstone on a scenic detour. Backroads, then. This one. I betcha it winds through the most gorgeous mountains ever.
Or maybe I'll ask Dad which route we took last time. . .

All the memories flood back from other roadtrips. All the nodding donkeys, the truckstops, the rest areas where we lost a baseball mitt, the infamous place where somebody soiled his onderbroekjes -- my road atlas impishly assures me that these places are still real, still there, still perhaps waiting for me to come back.

And probably I will. I know how to get there. Where there's a will, there's a map.

posted by whistler @ 4/29/2007 02:27:00 p.m.