Lost somewhere on a backbeat tiny two lane road between Newburgh and New Paltz, I realized our turn signals weren’t working. Pulling into a vacant, off-season Dairy Queen to double check our blinkers, I prepared myself to fumble, hands out the window, wildly signaling our direction. I realized that sometimes I just need to roll with the punches, ducking and dodging like Cassius Clay, the greatest. Greatness sometimes requires a change of plans. I never planned on being here, at Christian discipleship program, never expected to lose ten years to drugs, never saw the accident ahead, but I’m certainly thankful for the detour. Never in a million trillion years would I have ever chosen this, but as I drive through birch lined back wood roads cut by pretty shadows, with no turn signals, I’m thankful that I don’t know where I’m going. I guzzle back gulps of fresh air and sigh. I have it so, so good.
Tonight, Ritchie and I coast over rolling hills, high beams lit, zooming past blurring cars going somewhere in the darkness. Jamming to mid-nineties rock & roll and making small talk, somehow these conversations happen accidentally, unexpected, yet they always resonate with me like a tuning fork. I love those small chats and the little slices of silence that are never ever uncomfortable. Departing from the usual, we decide to take a different route home, a detour.
Sipping some Starbucks citrus note creation, we talk and wander through endless strip mall alleys. I notice there are no signs for any of the stores. Cardboard cup coffees in hand we meander in and out of countless stores, conversations knitting sordid narratives, the storyline to our lives, knotted by addiction. We gaze at dirty aquariums of gaudy fish, exchanging stories, fooling around, laughing, lounging, taking pictures, and feeling the buzz of life beating to the thump of our feet. Wandering, drifting aimlessly, talking and breathing life in a lungful, I remember that it’s about the journey.
Jazz is an epic detour. Listening to soul singers scream melodies so true, jazz so blue. It’s like I died and awoke in some after-hours French cabaret listening to Audrey Hepburn, black and white shoes, singing the blues. Exotic melodies floss through my teeth, clear headed, face bright with promise, my hips shake the covers off my cold bones. It’s the best way to wake. On a Sunday morning before breakfast, I feel full, even though a grumble growls through my stomach. It’s the sound that I can sink my teeth into, juicy October apples that crisp through cloudy fall days. Jazzy jazz, razz ma tazz meanders, a stroll spent wandering urban parks, no purpose, but you know you’ve been somewhere when it’s over.
Sunny D sunlight radiating through the windshield, Ritchie turns up the radio, a sugary spoonful of oldies on a Sunday morning. Nothing makes me smile like Brian Wilson beats on a warm November morning. Voices harmonize and echo cacophonous through the big blue Carolina van. The engine stutters, almost to the beat, the van dying slowly. At least it’s going out in style. En route to hand out Christmas tree flyers at a nearby church, we arrive and no one knows anything, so we leave, gassing the engine to make it back to camp for the 10:30 church service. I turn the radio dial all the way to the right and soak in the sunshine of the sixties. Why can’t they make music this good, today? Maybe, just maybe, we took the long way today, cruising out, just to come right back. I just groove and flow, making a roundabout return to where we began.
Running through wild, windy corridors, up rusty hills over rocks and roots, I always return right back to where I started. It seems silly at times, but I know I’ve been somewhere and it was worth it. As December and the end of my time here in New York approaches, I feel like I’ve been here before, but as a ghost, a shell of my current self. Unable to wake from a recurring thirty-one year nightmare, I shook free, and don’t want to go back, no never. Although I’m revisiting the starting line, it feels different this time around. I’ve changed and I know it. It’s been a long, twisted journey and now I’m starting all over again on a decadently different eleven month journey full of promise, nervous anticipation and love and silly secret jokes, all night chats, mix tapes, packs packed to the brim with all sorts of odd and ends. I can’t wait.
