What Kind of Foo

I am traveling by car with my husband and dog on the first day of our short, autumn beach vacation along Lake Michigan in northern Wisconsin. We are going to walk the beach, read, mosey around town, eat, and sleep. That’s it. I anticipate that we will be renewed, that our dog will be ecstatic running the beach and swimming, and that when we return to our daily Cleveland lives, I might try a few times to spice up our vacation reports to friends with some storytelling verve, some humorous or deep twist of adjectival hyperbole and detail overdrive, but I also anticipate this will prove unauthentic. A vacation like this is a quiet, little, small-vocabulary adventure, so anything from this adventure worth relaying can make its way to prose here.

Our rental car came equipped with satellite radio. New to it, I right away take to it. This is the first road trip for me where the need to search for powerful and interesting enough stations while cruising in and out of variant radio wave zones is eliminated.

Even after just an hour of SR experience, it tops my vacation happinesses list. It is bringing me into a small world mood not exclusive to vacation but certainly welcomed whenever it occurs, especially if the vacation is small and unremarkable, like this one. I scan for stations I like. I groove to the fact a station can reach and sound the same to someone in San Francisco.

Somewhere near Elkhart, Indiana, I look at the SR screen to check the details of a song that’s just started playing. Who is that cool singer?? The scrolling radio text screen is a mini, digital theatre marquis offering three bits of currently playing informational hits: It rolls “Siriusly Sinatra.” Then, “Sammy Davis Jr.” Then, “What Kind of Foo.”

Foo! I snicker. I think of food. Of Egg Foo Young. Of Kung Fu. Of foolish kings. Of the fact that something as enormous as satellite radio’s technology is partner to a comparatively minuscule screen display for communicating its ‘whatsis’. It’s like watching the world’s biggest globe revolving on a dressmaker’s pin! It’s precarious.

I love globes for the largess they offer. But today, in honor of the pin, the skinny abbreviating Sirius screen, I offer up today my pin-thoughts, my unremarkable, McSnippet comments about time and space and the unremarkable, McSnippet travel that connects and remakes them both. If I knew texting lingo, I would employ some here to make my McThoughts even McZippier. Or if I had time to tweet all these, I would sound off my commentary Twitteresque, arabesque. But I don’t, and I don’t.

• Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “There’s no road has not a star above it.” If you want to reach the stars, walk. If you want to walk your life’s path, keep your eye on the sky.
• There’s nothing more exotic than staying put on your porch on a summer night, swinging back and forth in the same porch swing space, sharing stories of the past, about this or that, with your friends, family, neighbors.
• If you want to be a famous travel writer, tell of your greatest loss and where that took you.
• When asked, while on an acid ‘trip’ conducted under medically controlled conditions, what time felt like to him, Aldous Huxley reported that he said he didn’t know, but that there seemed to be a lot of it.
• In Sanskrit, ‘pada’ means foot, journey, and page in a book. Every step you take is a chapter in your life’s journey. Is there any greater travel experience than simply being alive?
• Vacation postcards sum up our space-time continuum dreams. ‘The weather is great. Wish you were here.’
• If space is the final frontier, time is the cowgirl that’s wrangling its horses and stars into the barn.

I will post more vacation blogs in the coming weeks. I certainly have the time, vacationing fooL that I am.