When we were growing up, family vacations featured long-distance car rides, usually to campgrounds, on special occasions to air-conditioned motels with televisions. Dad always drove. Dad was a focused driver. If the goal was Lake Chelan State Park, only the need for gas caused the Pontiac to stop until we got there.
Judy reminds me that I inherited the same focus and displayed it regularly in our early married days. “Making good time” was my measure of success, generally to her displeasure. She read maps and travel guides noting the attractions we were missing as we sped toward the day’s target.
I can’t say how or when the change occurred but she must have nearly had a stroke when I said one day on a drive, “ I wonder where this road leads” and turned off the highway.
What ever was the hurry?
On a recent drive in Southern California, we took an off-ramp not taken before. We found a shopping district, a huge area like a mall in the sense that there were many stores in a small area, but like an updated Disneyland Main Street in appearance, complete with outdoor clocks on high standards and old fashioned street lamps. A fun novelty, one we had passed dozens of times before without knowing it was there.
A day or two later, I had a speaking engagement at a retirement community off Santa Monica Blvd., two blocks east of the Hollywood Freeway. The community featured a chapel that spoke of an earlier time, when even small congregations had traditional-looking sanctuaries with pipe organs and creaky wooden pews. The whole neighborhood conjured in me visions of what Los Angeles had once been like. It was a surprise visit to a past I had not known.
Countless times I have driven that freeway going from one place to some other place and missing a special place.
In San Diego, we walked through Balboa Park following no appointed schedule. From 1962 to 1964, as teenage sweethearts attending nearby San Diego High, we walked through Balboa Park following no appointed schedule, but otherwise distracted. This time we took time to notice.
We stopped to learn about the symbolic figures carved on the west entrance arch of the park, found a new museum, ate dinner at a place other than The Prado, the latter being a fine place to eat in the center of the park to which we had driven with purpose on many occasions. To top off the evening, we attended a concert at the Spreckles Organ Pavilion. In our sixty years of either living in or going to San Diego, we had never done that before. Why, we wondered?
I am not alone in making discoveries when I take the time to get off the freeway or break out of my habitual orbits. We’ve all likely wondered why it takes the visit of an out-of-town guest to get us to points of interest in our own communities.
I also know that curious people view the world as a horn-of-plenty, replete with far too many treasures to explore in any one lifetime. So, I have not beaten myself up much over failing to have done this or seen that before. We can’t do it all.
The older I get, the grumpier I become in the few days preceding a trip away from home. Once away, my grumpiness lifts immediately. I enjoy traveling, seeing new places and old friends, finding what there is to find. I am a grump because I am comfortable in my house following familiar routines, and these are hard to leave.
Invariably, I come home with great memories, glad to have made the trip. Inevitably, I repeat grumptitude a few days before the next trip. Is this a condition of many People of a Certain Age when we leave our comfortable routines?
Being retired, we have more time to get off the expressway, to break out of our usual orbit, at least in theory. We can choose what we do with our time, more so than those not yet retired. That is the gift of being retired.
I suspect, though, that if one has not broken the habit of conducting trips as mad dashes from point to point “making good time,” or one has never explored a place purely out of curiosity before retirement, these habits will be harder to develop. So, fellow People of a Certain Age, maybe we can mentor some younger folks we know in the fine art of taking one’s time on occasion.
I will say this about Dad’s way, though. We saw a lot of campgrounds and spent many days enjoying nearby wonders of nature, and we always made good time getting there.
Daniel E. White
September 2, 2015