Thoughts I Have While Driving

• Wuh oh! 20 miles over the posted limit again.
• Where is the next potty?
• What do I want to eat for (lunch, dinner, breakfast)?
• Thank God for green. So many different greens leaves, grass, jello. How do I mix the paints for this green, for that one? One can’t even buy the pigments to mix all the greens I see! Wow!
• Where Is Sammy? Sammy could find a hiding place in an empty bathtub. There are many hiding places in a packed car.
• What is that raffa-snaffa fool trying to do? Get off the road, you raffa-snaffa!
• I LOVE TO DRIVE!!!

The above occupy about 7% of all my driving time. The other 93% is spent examining thoughts, ideas, trying to understand, making things fit; explaining to the dashboard until I have a smidgen of understanding; arguing by analogy until things make sense. Examining the whichness of what and how to un-screw the inscrutable. I do pretty clear thinking while driving, if I fight through my mental muddle to some clarity.

These are the things I look at while driving:

• Steeples. Don’t know why I love them but I do. I love to see the proportion, building style, age, the grace of architecture. Steeples catch my eye all across the landscape. The right steeple and I drive over to see the church.
• The care with which some people plant their yard is heartwarming; a clump of iris surrounding a mail box post; an intricate checkerboard of pink and white alyssum; a small handful of raucous tulips in a straight line along a porch rail; hugely bountiful peonies, wearing that bed-head look. I could go on and on.
• The animal headcount in Little-furry-guys-vs.-I-81. I was influenced by Pogo, can’t get over if not identifying with, at least having sympathy fo,r Rackety-Coon-Chile, ingenuous and totally loveable. Too bad.
• Anything far away. We drove the skyline drive last Saturday. And anything that is partly hidden in mist.
• Anything new, that I haven’t seen before. That’s why I prefer not to drive the interstate, US 11 rather than I-81, and US 1 rather than I-95.
• The regression of seasons as I go farther north. I left my annuals, planted in the fall, already fully blown and somewhat past their time. Bulbs and azaleas are finished in Virginia and just starting in upstate New York. In Canada the people that are not boating plant their annuals this holiday long weekend. The days stay light longer and longer and the mornings get light earlier and earlier the farther north I go.


Nice.