Randy Fitzgerald

Barb and I were headed south for a few days recently, on one of the road trips that we enjoy so much—the relaxed chatting in the car, the miles rolling past beneath us, the pleasure of our favorite music: a little Van Morrison, a few oldies, a lot of bluegrass. I like putting the seat back when it’s her turn to drive and dozing off a bit, then waking up to find out I’ve been magically and painlessly transported to Raleigh or Columbia, where some new adventure awaits.

            One of our resolutions this year is to take a little road trip somewhere each month. I imagine most of them will be around Virginia since we don’t want to use vacation time for these shorter breaks. I want to travel Southwest Virginia’s Crooked Road. Though we’ve traveled some of it, we’ve never made the whole trip.  Barb wants to go back to Bath County, another beautiful part of the state. Closer at hand, a meandering drive down Route 5, dropping in on a plantation here and there, is always a treat.

            Car trips are one of the things we do best—once the packing is over. The preparation part of a trip is always chaos at our house. If we’re staying overnight, we make lists of the things we want to take with us, and we put far too many things on the list.  Barb always includes a lamp with a 100-watt bulb, knowing from experience that motels and inns tend either not to have a lamp on each side of the bed or not to have a bulb with enough wattage for reading. The lamp is usually not much of a problem, but a vulnerable lampshade necessarily takes up a lot of space in an already full car.

            Wherever we’re going, my take-along list always includes my banjo and guitar, and you can imagine how much room they take up in the trunk—not to mention a music stand and a canvas bag with music books.  We have to remember the cell phones and chargers, books to read or a stack of magazines to catch up with, a bag of food with fairly healthful snacks and our over-packed suitcases, of course, always.

            When lunchtime arrived on this recent journey, Barb in her turn at the wheel began to read the road signs to find a good place to stop. We ended up getting lunch to go at a mom-and-pop restaurant, and Barb bought a bottle of water with hers.  I have lived too long to accept paying $2 for a bottle of water, so I just asked in the restaurant if they’d give me a big cup of ice water with my sandwich to go, which they did, and I deposited it in the cup holder between the seats.

            Later, as we rolled down I-85 with my free water and her $2 water between us, Barb and I began a conversation about what constituted a waste of money, and what didn’t. Barb thinks toll roads are a waste of money, for instance, and she’ll drive pretty far out of her way to avoid them. She’ll go all the way to the Huguenot Bridge to get to Jahnke Road rather than spend the 50 cents on the Powhite. She’ll also drive way across town to save a few cents a gallon on gas or to pick up a bargain at the grocery.

 I on the other hand consider time saved worth the money.  But I get penurious when it comes to buying something I can get for free, like water.

“But you still buy newspapers,” Barb said to me, “and you can read them for free online.”

I shifted my jacket in my lap. “Reading online is a whole different experience,” I said. “It bears no resemblance to spreading the morning sports page across the kitchen table, or taking the front section that you didn’t have time to read in the morning to your easy chair at the end of the day. I’m buying the experience of luxuriating with the papers, not so much buying the news.”

As we discussed which of us was on the wiser path, I happened to look down into my big cup of ice water to find my cell phone soaking in the bottom of it.  I knew instantly the phone was gone forever.  The phone I had before this one was ruined when I left it on the lawn in a rainstorm, so I knew floating in a full glass of water was certain death.

My insensitive bride started to laugh so hard I thought she might have to pull over, though I’m sure I did look amusing, staring forlornly, pensively into my free glass of water as the phone’s antenna extended above the edge like some kind of technological drinking straw.

My new phone, by the way, cost $20.

It’s going to take a while longer for me to become accustomed to writing 2008 on my checks. In fact, if you must know, every now and then I’m even still prone to start off a year with “19—.”

        I really don’t too often feel behind the times, though—only when my children return home and hang around me for a few days at a time, as they did for a couple of days over Christmas.

        They actually moved back into the old bedrooms they had growing up. Sarah’s room is still pretty much intact, though she’s been graduated from college for five years, been in grad school for three, spent a year in AmeriCorps, lived in Europe and will no doubt never come back to this house to live again. But the big multi-colored bird (lots of reds and purples) is still hanging from her ceiling, the flowers (now dried) that I gave her on her 16^th birthday are on the bookshelf, the baseball glove of a true tomboy is pushed into the top of the curtain rod and the Far Side cartoon is still on the door. 

        Most of the year, though, Sarah’s old room is full of Barb’s file folders for the various jobs she’s working on, and the walls are full of Post-It notes about deadlines and appointments.  Sarah’s old desk now houses Barb’s computer, and though Barb does her best to get all her stuff out of the room on the infrequent occasions when Sarah comes home, the room is now always part Barb and part Sarah. It’s enough Sarah, though, that I notice she always pauses in the doorway to take it all in when she arrives back at what’s left of her childhood.

        Kyle, on the other hand, doesn’t recognize a thing in his room.  When he moved into his first apartment in college, he took his furniture with him, and it’s still with him two or three moves later. So his old room is now home to the high-def TV I got a couple Christmases back, my easy chair, my laptop, and my banjo and guitar.  When Kyle comes home, he seems happy enough to get an inflatable Aero bed on his old bedroom floor.

        This year, Christmas and the kids arrived a few days after our old computer crashed, and Barb and I had treated ourselves to a newer PC and a brand new laptop, neither of which we knew beans about.  Barb even hates it if I mess with the margins or type size on her computer, because she can never get them back exactly the way they were, so a different computer really had her teeth on edge. We had it hooked up all wrong, and we didn’t even know we needed software to connect the new computer to the old printer.

        An embarrassment of ignorance came when the help desk that was trying to repair the old computer that crashed called and asked Barb to bring over the original start-up disc for it.  She had no idea what that was, so she grabbed all the discs she found anywhere near the computer and took them over and said, “Maybe what you need is in this bag.”  The nice fellow at the desk patiently went through about 20 discs until, picking up one and examining it, he started to laugh. On the disc were the words “No Doubt.” 

        “Is that it?”  Barb asked.

        “No, Ma’am,” the repairperson said. “This is a CD of a band called No Doubt”—and then by way of elaboration, “the group that Gwen Stafani started with.”

        Who knew?

        Sadly, even with the weight of Gwen Stafani and No Doubt, the old computer could not be revived. So fortunately we put both children to work installing our new technology the minute they arrived at the house on the 23^rd of December, and they accomplished in about 15 minutes what we’d already been struggling with for a week.

        I’d like to say that Barb and I did not end up feeling stupid after all this, but we did. But the kids at least had not given up on us.  For Christmas they gave us electronics—I got a new jazzy cell phone and a Web cam, both of which I love, though I must say when I play my banjo in front of the camera, I neither look nor sound very good. Bummer, but clearly a fault of technology.

        Among other gifts, Barb got from the kids a DVD of the first season of “Saturday Night Lights,” a show she discovered a year late, and while a DVD may not sound high tech to you, you’ve clearly never tried to work our state-of-the-art DVD player, which Sarah and Kyle gave us last year. Maybe by next Christmas we’ll have figured out how to use it.