In transit

I am at a Drury Inn in Terre Haute, Indiana. It is quite nice. The bed is super soft and Cersei's sacked out next to me. Graham is taking a bath. We're both so tired we've lost about 50 IQ points each. Thus the short sentences.

I get all zen and philosophical whenever I travel, either a move or just a road trip. Usually I (like every normal person in the world) am pretty self centered - I go about my day and interact with people but I am always thinking about me and what I am going to do in my own life next. I mean, I'm a nice Southerner, so I ask about people I interact with and am interested in what's going on with them, but I think primarily about me.

When I get on the road, I realize that I'm just a stranger passing through everybody else's life. I'm an outsider. Nobody on the road in whatever random state I'm in knows me. None of the little towns I pass by are "mine." I don't think about how my grandfather used to farm that hill over there, or how I got WASTED at that bar when I was a teenager, or how I went to middle school with the bank teller. I'm just a stranger, watching little bits of other people's usually predictable lives.

We stopped at a truck stop near Sikeston, MO, and while we were in line to buy beef jerky I was watching one of the underage teenage cashiers who had just gone on her lunch break flirting with some skeezy looking 50ish trucker. Ugh. Not my life. Not my place in the world.

Later, we were sagging so we got Starbucks somewhere in Illinois. Two pretty-boy, gelled hair, metrosexual baristas were happy to give me an extra cup of water for my dog. They were pretty nice, but I kept feeling like I was just a scene in their lives, just a memory they'd probably forget entirely in a couple of weeks.

And all the houses beside all the interstates in America. Entire lives lived. Glimpses of a pretty yards with pretty houses. A dirt yard with a pickup and a dog kennel. Little farmsteads, with big barns and big houses and little silos. A modest clapboard house, with carefully laid out "Horsekeeping on a small acreage" hot-tape paddocks for the two happy looking horses. A sprawling compound, with a big professional sign advertising Puppies For Sale!! and an adjoining mud paddock with a mud-covered pony.

Other people's lives. I am nobody's life right now. Everything we own is zipping down the highway at 65 miles an hour. Except my horses! The new barn called and said they arrived safe and sound, walked around the arena and were drinking and eating hay. Yay. I have horses. I have a new chapter of life waiting for me, tomorrow.