Almost Ready to Go

It’s Thursday night; tomorrow morning Abbey and Whitsun and I eat breakfast at Morey’s in Oneonta, drive to Albany Airport where they drop me off for a 11:50 AM flight to San Jose, and they continue on to our house in Truro, Cape Cod, which we rent out in the summer and enjoy in the not-summer.

When I drive ten or twelve hours a day, I listen to booktapes. During the first few trips the books were on CD, borrowed from the library, which means that I was limited to whatever the library had at the time I left, and that I had to fumble with CDs all across America. A few years ago, we discovered an app that puts all the audiobooks in any library in the country at your fingertips, through your phone. I got a library card at the New York Public Library (the one with the lions) and have a massive number of books just a few clicks away (if this kind of thing interests you, let me know and I’ll give you all the details).

Whitsun wanted to send me off with some music, as well, so he took on what proved to be a monumental task: copying music, from his PC and mine, to my phone in a way that I could access it. Apparently phones are made for streaming music, not for loading files from a computer, and in fact it seems as if phone manufacturers have purposely made it difficult to do anything but stream. But Whitsun – who is the master of using YouTube videos to learn just about everything he needs to know – got it figured out, and now I have a musical option, between books or chapters. His selections are heavy on the Gorillaz, They Might Be Giants, a 90s style rock opera based on War of the Worlds, and some Star Wars hip-hop. He also successfully loaded my road trip song file, which is heavy on the folk music and Jackson Browne.

On the way home, during my first trip, I took a wrong turn going through Oklahoma City, and before long I was many miles out of my way. I had gone north instead of northeast, so I thought maybe I could get off the northbound Interstate and drive east on local roads until I ran into the Interstate I needed. This, of course, turned into getting even more lost, this time in the middle of nowhere. I remember noting that middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma looked a lot like middle-of-nowhere New York.

During this interesting diversion, I was listening to NPR, and they were interviewing a guitar duo I had never heard of , Rodrigo y Gabriella. They played a few songs and I was hooked. I pulled over into someone’s dirt driveway and wrote their name down on a map, and when I got home I started listening to their music.

Long story short (too late!): at the very beginning of each trip west – starting literally when driving out of the driveway – I have played their first album all the way through. It sounds a lot like I feel when I’m finally free to drive west.