The Reader Travels

So, we’ve been talking about The Grapes of Wrath and migrant farmwork, which led me here now to David Sedaris and his very funny book, Naked. His story “C.O.G.” starts with a long-distance bus ride to Oregon where he is bound for an apple orchard so he can pick fruit from trees. On this road trip, he encounters a number of people, some of them quite “touched.”

I love how he describes some of the people he encounters on the bus, particularly the girl who curses her dead-beat ex-boyfriend for knocking her up. (As a contrast, Wade over at Vagabond Journey describes how super nice it is to travel by bus in countries that aren’t the US. Who knew?)

Sedaris seems to have gone the way of Kerouac, slipping into these farm-workers’ worlds for a moment of his time, just to escape home to the east coast when things get a little too hairy for him. Of course, Sedaris is well aware of his youthful delusions and pretensions in the hindsight telling of the tale, poking fun at himself as mercilessly as he does the people he encounters. It just makes him all the more endearing.

So I went with my mother and sister-in-law to see Topol’s farewell tour of Fiddler on the Roof in Dallas two months ago, and at the end of the show, the sister said, “I didn’t remember that the ending was so depressing.” Well, yeah.

Her brother had told her before we left for the show that the story was about events that triggered the start of the Zionist movement and the creation of the state of Israel. She just looked at him funny like he was making it all up, probably because he makes up a lot of things and she can never really tell if he’s serious or not.

He’s literally the boy who cried wolf as most of his tall tales end with some sort of wolf attack, which he fends off with his masterful powers of Dan-fu. She should have known that since there were no wolves in this story, that he probably knew what he was talking about.

Anyway, the story ends with a big long road trip that somehow wends its way to Jerusalem. The end. Oh, did I mention I met a hot Israeli chick on the airplane to London? I told her I was going down to Houston for a Jewish wedding next month. It was only a five hour drive, I said. She had to comment that a five hour drive would take you all the way from one end of her country to the other.

Amazing how they were spread out all over the world and now they can just hop in the car and be there in less than a day, only dodging a little gunfire along the way.

So, I’ve been writing about road trips, and I’m actually on one. Right now. We drove from Dallas, south on I-35, through Waco, Austin and San Antonio, to the lovely new Best Western motel on Highway 90 in Hondo, Texas. The view from our window is a corn field that stretches off into the horizon.

If you’re ever out this way, check out Billy Bob’s BBQ, out back of Billy Bob’s Hamburgers. Word is, it’s a very popular spot for high school kids, and it seems to be built for picnicking and socializing. New on the menu is the brisket taco for $1.79. A thin layer of soft flour tortilla wraps a huge wad of tender, smoky meat. A smear of guacamole and a smattering of pico de gallo adds just a hint of southwestern flavor.

Mmmm. Mouth filled with meat. Need I say more?

So I’ve got wretched allergies, right? And I’m really bad about going to the doctor.  It’s more because I hate making phone calls than I hate going to the doctor, and I think more doctors should do online scheduling, but that’s another story.

My eyes were itching and watering for three months before I finally decided to go to an eye doctor. Anyway, the first thing they did when I went in was to take a quick eye test, and I could hardly read any of the lines on the chart, with my glasses on.  One week later, after 10 drops a day and a bizarre regiment involving baby shampoo and a Q-tip, my eyes were vastly improved, and I could read a whole lot more lines on the eye chart.

So I’m realizing that I’ve been driving around with seriously impaired vision for a while. I might even blame my vision for that ticket I got running a red light on Northwest Highway, costing me $75. Not only was my eyesight impaired, I drove around squinting all the time because the light hurt my eyes, driving east in the morning and west in the evening, always into the sun. It’s a wonder I didn’t have an accident.

So the moral to the story is… ach, no moral. It’s just better to be able to see if you’re going to be driving a motor vehicle. Duh.