So, since we’re now a gluten free household, we’ve had to break down and become the type of people who shop at Whole Foods. We still resist it, only shopping there for specialty items like gluten-free andouille sausage, this non-frozen gluten-free bread we can’t seem to find anywhere else, sorghum beer and an array of snacks.

Thing is, we don’t have one of these stores in my town, so we have a few choices about where to go. At the new store in the Lakewood neighborhood of Dallas, they have more parking spaces reserved for hybrids than they do for handicapped people. The one time we went to the store at Preston and Forest, we couldn’t find anything because it was such a maze, and the staff was even snooty when we asked for help. “You walked right by it,” the woman proclaimed. Months later, my sister-in-law wanted to stop there for something, and I stayed in the car, not wanting to feel the bad energy in there ever again.

The best option open to us was the Whole Foods in Arlington, Texas. I knew the store, had even been to two cooking classes there since they were taught by my girlfriend’s brother. As I remembered it, it wasn’t that bad. But still, when we drove out there and I gave directions, I said, “It’s on the right up ahead, just follow the smug cloud.”

Just as I remembered it, it wasn’t terrible. It wasn’t set up on one of those crazy mazes where you can’t find what you need or you have to start over at the beginning if you miss something. Easy in, easy out, and good customer service. I’d like to think that if they ever put in a Whole Foods in Irving, Texas, they’ll put in one like that — nice staff, efficient layout, minimal pretension.

I must admit, it was a little depressing to read Two for the Road at the time I was reading it. We were on a short road trip of our own, staying in a little cabin on Lake Murray, a few miles north of the Red River in Oklahoma. I’d been there before with friends, and I was now sharing the place with my man and our little dog.

I remembered the great catfish and home cooking restaurants I’d been to with my friends, and I would have shared those too, except for one minor problem. The husband had just been diagnosed with Celiac disease, and he couldn’t eat any of it. Add the fact that it was Thanksgiving week, realizing that naked green beans, naked turkey and naked mashed potatoes were the only things he could eat on that normally joyous feast day, and it makes for a pretty sad vacation.

Meanwhile, I’m reading this book about all these places he wouldn’t dare eat in, reading all these recipes I’d never be able to cook for him. I’d look up from my book and smile a little sad smile at him, altering the recipes in my head, thinking, yeah, that could work.

Thank goodness for our next-door neighbors, who don’t even realize how they saved our vacation. Before we left for Oklahoma, the doorbell rang, and there was Ted Brown with a great big smoked pork loin wrapped in tin foil. He’s a wizard with the barrel smoker, and the meat was magically tender and delicious.

We made pork nachos to watch Monday Night Football, pork omelettes for breakfast, soft pork tacos with lime, onions and cilantro on corn tortillas for lunch the next day. It didn’t matter that we couldn’t have the requisite BBQ sandwiches. That meat made everything delicious. Oh, and imagine how wonderful our Sunday soup tasted with all that neighborly warmth cooked in. Food is still amazing, even without the wheat.

I’ve been on this road trip tour for one year and three months, and now I’m ready to start talking about food travels. The trip started with my maternal grandmother who always shared good food and a warm kitchen. And it’s ending with a couple who have spent their marriage on the road in search of the best in home style cooking.

Two for the Road is Jane and Michael Stern’s memoir all about their Roadfood history and experiences. With chapters like “What Would Jesus Eat?” and “The Cow on the Roof and the Living Pig,” they sum up a few decades of touring towns across the USA, eating good and bad food alike.

In the beginning of the book, I found myself comparing their travels to Steinbeck’s, as they decked out their station wagon, hoping to live in their car to save cash. Their car was no Rocinante (Steinbeck’s name for his campered pick-up truck), and they were at the beginning of their career instead of the end.

Steinbeck also traveled alone, leaving his wife at home, in hopes of seeing the real America, thinking that traveling with someone might add too many variables to the social dynamic. He wanted to observe more than he wanted to be observed. But I think the Sterns managed to see a lot of the “real” USA by being grandly conspicuous, because they not only went to eat, they wanted to dig in and taste the people, how they lived, how they talked, what they believed.

Steinbeck feared that all the different accents across the country were being melted together so everyone was starting to sound the same, but the Sterns embraced the differences. “From the ear-bending patois of Long Island to the sugarcane sweetness of north Georgia, from the honk of Chicago to the musical refinement of New Mexico’s mountain villages, the voices people use to talk about what they eat are as enchanting as the food itself.” 

As I start down this new food journey, I find myself looking for friendly recommendations. If you were thinking about books or movies where food plays an important role, what would be on your list?

When I read Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, I kept thinking, this is a man I would have enjoyed hanging out with. You know how people sometimes ask you to name three famous people living or dead you’d like to meet, I’d probably have him on my list.  I may not have agreed with all his politics, but I had a lot of respect for him, and I got the impression he was a great conversationalist. I just liked him, plain and simple.

Anyway, it made me think of the questions Woody Allen raised in Bullets Over Broadway, about knowing the difference between loving the artist and loving the man.  They’re good questions to ask, especially if you’re somebody like Woody Allen, a great artist with an all-too flawed persona.  Some people can’t get past the man to appreciate the artist, like in the case of Roman Polanski and that thing with the thirteen-year-old girl. Others find themselves disillusioned when the media persona is shattered by reality, the most recent example being with America’s favorite golfer, Tiger Woods.

And though I don’t know any of these people personally, here are some thoughts I have on the artist versus the man:

1. Alice Walker - I think I love the woman more than I love the artist, even if I don’t always agree with her politics. Her art is often a vehicle for her politics, but that’s OK, because I just love her. Can’t explain it.
2. Gary Oldman - Love the artist. I have a strong feeling I might not be able to tolerate the man.
3. Sean Penn - Same thing. Love the artist. Not so sure about the man. 
4. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon - Wow, did they really break up? Love the artists, could have totally had a couples affair. Again with the politics, though.
5. Natalie Merchant - I used to love the artist, and I was in awe when I saw the 10,000 Maniacs in concert and she stood up there singing acapella. Then I just got too annoyed at all the smug dripping off her and her music, and I just can’t even listen to her anymore.
6. Ann Beattie - Love the writer, but after reading one or two interviews with her, she’s probably not much fun to talk to.
7. Matthew McConaughey - You know, I don’t care much for the artist, but I’d totally hang out with this dude, if only just to smell him and his no-deodorant-wearing self.

My parents were an hour behind us on the road from New Orleans to Dallas, having stopped for a brief visit in Baton Rouge. The sun was bright and we made good time, unlike the trip out, which was snowy and rainy and dark and long.

My mother called me as she neared Dallas, squealing with delight at the snow along the hillsides lining the roads. She and Dad had left a day earlier and hadn’t seen all the snow the rest of us had to drive through. All she saw was the beauty, something she’s appreciating more as she gets older and mortality threatens.

I remember seeing Rain Man at the movie theater when it came out. These two brothers, who don’t know each other, are on a road trip across America, neither one of them seeing the beauty of the landscape along the way. It was something that really struck me about the film, how beautiful the photography was, how awe inspiring, and yet they didn’t see it, being trapped in their own minds.

I have just one final thought.  If you’re going to take a road trip, don’t forget to look out the window.

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.