It seems like all I ever go to New Orleans for is funerals. Last time it was my step-grandmother, and now her husband has followed. Even getting remarried didn’t save him from dying three years after losing his wife of forty years. And his new wife Mary has known her share of loss, saying farewell to yet another man she loved.  People get old and they die. God takes care of the rest.

The Saints are in the Super Bowl today, an exciting and historic event, and Mardi Gras season is in full swing. We head out for the crescent city on Thursday, and the town will be filled with jubilation even if the Colts win the ball game. But we go to mourn.

I have never known a kinder man than Alan Temple Sparkman. He loved so much he had eight different wives in his lifetime. When he married my grandmother and adopted her son, it was the best thing that ever happened to my dad. Pop taught him one of the most valuable lessons in life. He taught him about love, honor and respect, and these are things my dad passed on to his own children.

With so many divorces and marriages, there must be casualties along the way. Broken homes are like sunken ships with the survivors grasping hold of flotsam and swimming for far reaching islands, surviving yet searching for ways back home, often unable to bridge the miles between them.

My father and his younger brother both met and married women from unbroken families and built their own sturdy islands of honored marriage vows and children who stay close beyond the miles. They learned love, honor and respect, and they also learned from a few of their father’s mistakes.

So we will have our own funeral parade, our headlights on, weaving through Mardi Gras traffic, as life and celebration roll on. Farewell honored husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, friend.

It’s possible that no road trip book tour would be complete without a discussion of Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: in Search of America. He talked about the uniqueness of every journey, each like a snowflake with different patterns and idiosyncrasies. Thus, he said, every different person who traveled the same road he did would have a different impression of what America really is.

Surely there are commonalities, but even the roads and the landscape are colored by weather and traffic conditions and the unique state of mind of the driver. As humans we can connect on some level with common experiences and objects, but our unique perceptions create millions of images or versions that we can’t always reconcile. So many possibilities, so many Americas.

One thing I found interesting in Travels with Charley was Steinbeck’s comments about not wanting to draw us a map about exactly where he was in the trip. He said that some people like to have the geography lined out for them so they can better imagine where he was. I admit, I’m one of those people, but I completely understood what he was getting at. The exact geography was not relevant, just something superficial getting in the way of our connecting on the actual experiences.

And just because you might know exactly what road he was on and what restaurant, doesn’t mean you could ever experience his trip. It doesn’t mean you could ever run off sadly trying to recreate his journey for yourself to touch ever so superficially upon his celebrity.

So if you traveled the same roads and ate at the same restaurants and ordered the same things off the menu and stayed at the same hotels and decked out a truck with a camper, a shotgun, a fully stocked bar and a big black French poodle, you’d be totally missing the point. Read the memoir. Meet the man. It’s the only way to connect in any human way with his travels.

In Skinny Legs and All, Boomer decked out an old Airstream trailer to look like a big basted turkey and took his new bride for a ride. But their road trip wasn’t the most interesting one in the book. The most interesting road trip was the one taken by the objects they left behind, whose drive and focus was to get themselves first to New York City and then to the holy land.

Led by a sacred conch shell and a magical painted stick, the can of beans, spoon and sock make very slow, microscopic movements, while Boomer and Ellen Cherry speed through their lives both together and apart. In this culture of instant gratification, I am inspired by these characters who take this long, hard road and persevere.

I think about my own job and how I am mostly satisfied that things are getting better every day, even though it’s all too often slower than anyone would like. If I had more time, if I had more resources, if I had fewer demands, then things could go much, much faster. But these are the limitations I live with and must accept, and knowing that the pursuit of my goal is unswerving, I am happy with the seemingly microscopic movements, and I can see the progress and feel its silvery glow.

My heart may not bleed, but I see Che as depicted in The Motorcycle Diaries as my kind of leader. He’s one who serves those he leads. I like to think of myself as a servant leader, a term I learned from a friend who was big into her church.  She told me what she was learning in her class at the church, and I said, “That’s what I am,” and she promptly agreed.

Sometimes it goes beyond servant leadership into outright mothering.  I tend to get all maternal on people with all the protecting and nurturing and whatnot. You’ve got to watch out for stuff like that because some people might take it as condescending, especially if you’re doing it to your boss or your boss’s boss. You can see it now:

Me:  “Aww, you poor thing, are you having a hard time? What can I do to help you, darlin’?”
Boss: “You can do your job and get outa my bidness. That’s what you can do. I’m The Man, and I’m better than you. Grrr.”

That kind of “empathy” can actually get a person in trouble. I’ve lost friends over it. Of course, another thing that gets me in trouble is the fact that if I’m maternal, I’m inadvertently exhibiting mothering techniques learned from my own mother, which means, I’m hyper-critical.

I had this kid come to work in my department once, fresh out of the nearby Catholic university. Having escaped from his own domineering mother in Nebraska after high school, he wasn’t quite ready to meet up with her counterpart at his first big job. He was a talented kid, but he needed to learn attention to detail. He just wasn’t ready to learn it from me.

This whole maternal protector thing has been my biggest CLT. I once did a “Whatever!”-talk-to-the-hand to the company’s CEO in the middle of an all staff meeting in lioness protector mode. I’ve taken on superiors and adversaries who abused their power and their people. Thankfully, I’ve learned a little diplomacy since then.

All I can do now is serve and lead and help others to recognize how powerful a combination that can be.

Whether you’re on the left or the right or somewhere in the middle, set your politics aside. The Motorcycle Diaries is a great movie. And I don’t care if he is two feet tall, Gael Garcia Bernal is hot.

Young doctor Ernesto Guevara takes a motorcycle trip with his best friend across South America. He is not a tourist, but a traveler, meeting the people and learning the land as he goes. Like Kerouac in his North American travels, Guevara runs across poor farm workers trying to keep their families alive. The difference is that Jack is a writer and observer, a pretentious, partying prat; while Ernesto is a doctor, a healer, who cares for patients and people.

I admit it, my heart doesn’t really bleed. I hate commercials that try to guilt me into sending my pocket change to starving kids in third world countries. I run in the opposite direction if anyone tries to motivate me with guilt. I am not appalled at war or poverty or corporate greed. But it takes all kinds of people to keep some semblance of balance in the world. Not that we really have any.

I don’t know about who Che really was, or who he became after the idealistic young doctor toured the countryside on his motorcycle. I just know I like the character they portrayed on the screen. I’d have totally done him.

One of my best friends gave me the latest John Irving novel for Christmas, while I’m actually pondering his first. It’s a motorcycle buddy road trip book called Setting Free the Bears with these two young men riding all over Germany, eating radishes, drinking lots of beer and plotting a jail break at the local zoo.

Honestly, I liked the story, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as his later works, mostly because he had not found his “voice” quite yet. The concept of voice in fiction writing is one that fascinates me. I assume that I won’t really have mine defined until I write more than one novel. But I sometimes wonder if I’ll ever finish the first one, much less write the second one.

Of course, my man keeps telling me I need to just write the second one already. I’ve rewritten the first one four times and I need to just bless it and release it until my wisdom catches up with the subject matter. After all, I wrote the first sentence of novel #2 more than ten years ago, and it’s time I wrote the second.

Of course, time is at a premium, and things have to happen in the right order: 1) get my Series 7 at work (though I’m beginning to question this one); 2) finish home improvement projects; 3) ___________; 4) consider new career in teaching to get my summers off; 5) write an entirely new novel.

In the meantime, I’m honing my blog voice. And we won’t even talk about the singing career I’ll never explore.

Yes, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a road trip book.  It’s all about a father and his son on their motorcycle, riding from the lakes of Minnesota to the mountains in North Dakota, to the red woods in California. But I’ll warn you now, if you ever intend to read it, it’s very thin on plot, so you shouldn’t expect a page turner.

The fact is, this journey is not for everyone. Most people who pick it up make it through the first 75 pages or less and then decide they can’t take any more of the trip. I admit, I sometimes had to force myself to turn the pages, but I was glad I made it to the end.

It was kinda like my very first vacation as a married person. We didn’t have a lot of money, so driving was really the only option. Unlike our zen friends, our problem was that we had too much plot in a one week span, but we probably should have packed up and headed home just for our sanity.

We first drove from Dallas to Atlanta to visit a friend who lived in a nice house in the suburbs with his parents and kid sister. We went to a big music festival, several movies and even took a day trip to Chattanooga to see the aquarium.

We came home by way of New Orleans, staying with family while we were there. We went to a Tulane football game in the Super Dome then visited the French Quarter to watch guys in dog collars and assless chaps for Southern Decadence. We visited my grandmother in a nursing home, her head shaved bald after some brain surgery, delusional, though she recognized me for her last time on that visit.

We took another side trip to Carville, Louisiana, to do some research for a novel, and got a tour of the hospital before they closed it down a year later (they’ve since reopened the facility as a museum). I wasn’t afraid of catching a disease, but the stress of the stigma and the exhaustion of the trip made me want to go home right then.

We were so scarred after that trip, we decided we never again wanted to visit friends or family on our vacations. But like the book, I’m really glad we finished that trip. My life will never be the same.

When I first started talking about this road trip tour with my friends, they all had ideas about books I needed to include. When one of them mentioned Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I dusted off my copy and vowed to actually read it this time. The lavendar-colored paperback was hiding in the back room with all the fantasy and sci-fi trilogies, who had been read, but lovingly placed aside for later rediscovery.

Part of the procrastination was the perception that this was one of those “life changing” books like something that Oprah would shove down people’s throats. I expected it to be thought provoking and touchy-feely, and filled with the illusion that the author had some deep wisdom to share with those in the world who were ready to hear it. I’m not opposed to a little eye opening, I just have to be in the mood for it.

But what I found when I read it was that this guy was so far from “together” that it wasn’t really about any wisdom he could share. Instead it was just a look inside his brain. He found his own personal zen in dissecting every thought, every combination of thoughts, every part in the machine of motorcycle and mind. Basically, he was embracing his OCD and sharing it with the world.

So I think about my own tendency to lose myself in compulsive activities like solitaire and Bejeweled, and wallpaper peeling. As I pick and scrape and pull at each tiny little remnant of paper on my bathroom walls, there is peace. I’m going to scrape the popcorn off the ceiling next. Om.

My one experience riding a motorcycle was a dirt bike my boyfriend owned in high school. Of course my mother forbade my riding on it. She knew it would be futile to forbid me to date the wretched boyfriend, but she could hold onto her illusions about the motorcycle thing.

I have to say, it’s always been easier for me to keep secrets than to tell outright lies. If I hadn’t crashed the bike on the dirt trail and twisted my ankle, it would have been smooth sailing. But sporting an Ace bandage and a limp meant I had to come up with something to tell her that wouldn’t have me admitting to the crime.

When you’re a terrible liar, you have to keep it simple. The boyfriend was all about elaborate lies. He told my parents he had been doing some mechanic work underneath his car, when an axle or some other heavy under-body part swung loose and hit him in the head. All so he wouldn’t have to admit that he got drunk at the beach and lost a fight with a guy who was simply talking to me. I don’t remember the lie he expected me to tell when he flipped his car into a ditch and left it there because he didn’t have a driver’s license, all while I waited for him at the Stop N Go, my purse in the back seat of his car. All I knew was that it was just too complicated, and I wouldn’t have pulled it off if pressed about it.

So I kept my little lie simple, to something I could envision myself doing, as clumsy as I am. I can still see it now, even more vividly than the truth of the motorcycle lying on my ankle. I was just walking along the brick steps beside the house I grew up in. I twisted my ankle by stepping off the side of one of the bricks as I had done twice before, for real. The fresh mint was overgrown there because of a leak in the hose, spraying water, so the steps were damp, but everything smelled minty clean.

Of course I ended up married to a great storyteller. If he were telling the tale, I would have twisted my ankle fighting off a large pack of wolves. The wolves would all be dead or severely wounded, but all I’d have to show for it would be a bruised ankle from landing a little wonky after drop-kicking the leader of the pack.

I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road this past summer, thinking it might be a nice addition to my road trip tour. It’s the story of a father and son traveling through post-apocolyptic North America. Along the road, they search for food and for some evidence to support their dream that maybe, just maybe, there are a few good people left in the world.

I enjoyed the book. It’s well written, deep and poetic. But I did have a few problems with it. First off, I just couldn’t understand how they could survive when absolutely no wild life, other than one stray dog could survive. There wasn’t even any mention of cockroaches, which as everyone knows will outlast any catastrophe.

Another problem I had was the absolutist approach that cannibalism could be nothing but evil. It seems a very narrow world view to me, but at the same time, it works for the story, as what they see from the road must certainly be a similarly narrow view. In most travels, what we see from the road merely scrapes the surface of the life beyond the road. And we all know that the locals don’t always welcome travelers for dinner, unless it’s maybe to eat them.

One thing I loved was the images and memories of fish as a symbol of heaven. I guess as Thanksgiving approaches, we really should be thankful for the things we often take for granted, things as simple as the ability to go fishing in a lake or river, to bring home food for our bellies.

Anyway, it’s only appropriate that the movie is out now, during Thanksgiving time. Be thankful for what you have, for it all might be taken away.