Drive Time

When I get off work, it's not unusual for me to walk out the door, unhinge my cell phone and start chatting with someone. I'm prone to jawing all the way home from work, up the stairs, into the apartment and through changing clothes, pausing only to greet Kudzu. But then I discovered the MLK Parkway, a bypass leading from downtown to the road the leads to the beach, and things got quiet.

These days, I don't make as many calls from the car. I carefully guard the time I have from the minute I close the door until I get home. The old route home involved a million stop lights and nondescript suburban roadside concrete block buildings and neon signs and fast food drive-thrus. But the new route is peaceful, curving out over the tributaries and marshes formed by the fingers of the river. Over the rim of the overpass you can see skinny trees clad in ash-white bark and hung with streamers of Spanish moss. Water pushes lazily against the marsh grass and muddy banks. And two abandoned railroad trestles cross from one marshy bank to the other, old and crumbling but somehow still charming. In the distance chalk-white puffs rise up from the smoke stacks of the manufacturing plant on the outskirts of downtown.

Nowadays, I can sense the day getting shorter, moving toward daylight savings time and early darkness. But today, the afternoon was golden and crisp and the windows were rolled down and the new John Mayer CD was playing "Stop This Train" and it was perfect. I moved over to the slow lane, went 5 under the limit and let myself absorb the solitude and isolation. People were passing me going 10 above the limit, and I felt a little sorry for them, in a hurry to get nowhere and missing everything.

As I came into town, the light was flashing off the new pharmaceutical building at the edge of town, making it shimmer like hundreds of mirrors. Then I came down the rise onto Third Street and looked at the line of steeples from the old courthouse to the Presbyterian church atop the next hill and I was home. And to add to it all, it's Friday.