We’ll Just Drive Down to L.A.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Dylan Thomas
“We’ll just drive down to L.A.”
Hearing my daughter speak those words made me realize anew that there's a fathomless gap between the world of twenty-somethings and that of fifty somethings.
“But it’s already four o’clock,” I observed unhelpfully.
“So?”
She is having some sort of crisis with her visa. This morning we took her to be fingerprinted at our local Application Support Office (who knew?), a storefront facility with darkened windows located in a K-Mart parking lot between the Nails and Waxing Salon and the Indo-Chinese take-out. Things are hushed and serious in the Application Support Office. There’s a flag in the reception area, and on the wall a framed photograph of an aging frat boy with a smirk (oh, never mind; it’s what’s-his-name) and a large sign forbidding cell phones, cameras, briefcases, tweezers, trench coats, chewing gum, whatever comes to mind.
I decided to wait outside rather than forfeit so many of my possessions, so I don’t exactly know what transpired in there, but my daughter came out a half hour later with more papers and additional tasks. Apparently some crucial form now needs to be filed and something must be done to her passport but said passport must somehow be back in her hands in time for her flight to London Monday, and there’s that long 4th of July weekend coming up, which doesn’t help.
Not to worry. It turns out there are people you pay to expedite such things. (Again, I ask, who knew?) There is in fact a woman in L.A. who can get everything processed in time, guaranteed, but she needs all the papers before 8 a.m. tomorrow morning.
That’s when my daughter casually suggests that she and her boyfriend simply borrow the car and head down there this afternoon, first driving thirty miles in the opposite direction to deposit me at home, then a hundred miles south to the house of the passport and visa expeditor, then home again tonight.
It’s inconvenient, sure, but certainly not insurmountable, so why in the world does this seem like such a huge deal to me when she first proposes it? I guess it's because I can’t imagine starting out on a spontaneous journey after 5, old fart that I am, especially if it involves turning around and coming right back the same night. And because I happen to be tired already, and every bone in my body is oriented towards getting home and settled after the errands of the day. God, I would hate to have to drive down to L.A. right now.
But no one is asking me to do this.
In fact, we are at one of those junctions where I sense that my opinion is not particularly relevant.
Still, I find I am uncomfortable with the plan. Aside from my personal resistance to it, there’s an element of worry here too. You know: the mother thing.
My daughter reminds me at this point that she is twenty-one years old.
I try to remember what that was like. I flash back to the time Lynne and I drove six hours from Long Island to Oneonta purely on a whim and then back the same night, punchy and exhausted by the time we reached the Palisades Parkway into New York City at daybreak, which is where a policeman stopped me for speeding. It was a pointless adventure but we convinced ourselves it was evidence of our being free spirits, a couple of carpe diem gals who could act on an impulse, even a stupid one.
I hadn’t even realized that my father was planning to use the car to get to work that morning until I pulled up and encountered him standing baffled in the driveway. I escaped his wrath only because he had reached the point where he was relieved rather than angry to see me. I can still picture him standing there in his paint-splattered overalls, buckets and brushes by his side and a ladder leaning against the garage.I hope I had the sense to feel ashamed.
So, yes. There were adventures and misadventures aplenty. Sometimes I was taking care of business, other times just being a self-absorbed fool. Either way, I can see that I had an entirely different set of parameters back then. Distances seemed less daunting. Night meant bonus hours for living and I stayed awake by choice. (Sleep? Isn’t that why morning was invented?) Possibilities were endless and fear was not a factor. And no one could actually tell me what to do.
HereI must distinguish my daughter from myself and credit her for having serious goals and a vision. At her age I was still motivated mostly by immediate gratification and a desire to defer responsibility, although in my own defense I hasten to add that I came from a tragic and troubled family and had a great deal more to run away from. Still, I imagined there was something clever and almost noble in my avoidance of workaday ruts, as though I were somehow aspiring to a higher standard for myself.
If I may speak in terms of my generation, I think we were all pretty certain we could avoid the traps our parents had walked into, and I swiftly transferred my loyalties to my peers and boyfriends, to whom I attributed great wisdom. I seem to have squandered staggering amounts of time doing nothing at all of value, but I was incapable of feeling any sense of urgency or even reality when it came to constructive life plans.
“Youth is wasted on youth,” my father would say, and I would roll my eyes.
ButI was one of them.
––––––––––
Mission L.A.? It was easily accomplished. They even stopped at In & Out Burgers on the way home. It was sort of an adventure, I guess, and I’m sure there was laughter and intense conversation all the way, because who could be more fun and interesting than the person you are in love with in your twenties?
Who cares that it could have been avoided with better planning? So what if they left the tank empty and are still fast asleep even now? They got home safely, and my daughter’s passport will be ready for her trip, and that sweet belief in the manageability of things has been reaffirmed.
WhatI want to know is when did I become the person who sees all the barriers? When did I become the one you tune out, the one who warns and chides, who craves spontaneity but would just as soon stay home? Who calculates costs and lies awake worrying? Who insists on being instructive knowing full well that the only teacher is life itself?
Youth, you see, is a foreign country. Maybe even a different planet.
And I've left it far behind.
(But I’m not done singing in my chains.)