Independence Day

 

July 4, 2009

 

I drove out to Scranton to see my daughter yesterday after vowing 25 years ago never to travel on the Fourth of July weekend – after that one year from my ex-wife decided to visit the New Jersey shore and demanded we take the most laborious, most heavily traveled route, pausing at every yard sale she could see there and back.

This weekend, however, has something of a history for me in that regard.

Back in 1972, Hank and I traveled to a race way in the Poconos over the 4th of July weekend to see a rock concert. I had just broken up with my ex-wife and hoped we would meet there.

Which did not occur until ten years later when during the same weekend, I made the trip to see them again in Scranton for the first time in years.

This year traffic was particularly brutal, partly because people have become more brutal, each person feeling the pinch of being insignificant so doing their best to get ahead of everyone else at all costs.

I suspected trouble the moment I got to the entrance of the New Jersey Turnpike north and saw the lines there. But the worst wait occurred five miles out from the Delaware Water Gap where we inched to the toll across the river, and then for another five miles up into the mountains on the other side.

My daughter recently lost a cat. So this was sort of a trip to cheer us up.

She had planned events for us, including a trip to the park and its waterfall, and possibly a movie – the current foolish ice age thing.

I wanted to go to Steam Town to look at the trains, a rare museum where old trains gathered in a graveyard for the public to see just what a grand heritage America had lost.

I discovered how much more like me my daughter was when she told me that she used to hop freight trains when younger the same way I did.

She is all the proof I need to know how much gets passed along in the genes.

 

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When I got back I found a freelance check in the mail from one of the newspapers I work for and a letter from DreamWorks offices warning me not to send the company any unsolicited materials.

This apparently shows just how terrible a writer I am when I can make fan letter seem like a job proposal

Perhaps it was – despite the fact I can’t act or sing or tell a joke.

Secretly, everybody wants to be accepted to something, and make light of the fact we don’t qualify either for lack of talent or some other reason.

It is all about leaving a mark in the world, standing out the way those foolish drivers going to Pennsylvania yesterday did.

I know a great lady in New York City, who is fighting Michael Bloomberg’s development plans, who left her mark as part of the movie Wall Street.

Movies mean immortality these days the way plays and novels used to.

 

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Anyway, my daughter and I got rained on most the day. At the park near the falls. Then again later when we tried to leave the museum.

We had parked in the lot next to the mall when we came, and worked our way through the mall to the long steel elevated platform that took visitors from the mall to the train museum.

This gave us a great view of the rail yards, but isolated us.

The clerk at the museum store told us we either had to go back through the mall, up that steel platform in thunder and lightning or make a mile or more trek along the winding road out. And we had to hurry because sometimes the mall locked the door on their side when the museum closed.

We could see my car across the tracks and behind the tall fence, but could not reach it.

I wanted to see if there was a break in the fence, but to do so would have required us to walk even further in the open in the rain and exposed to lightning.

In the end, with my daughter terrified that lightning would strike, we rushed up the steel platform and got to the door, and pulled.

Fortunately it opened.

Our wet shoes squished as we walked through the mall.

When we got to the car, we looked and saw that there was indeed a break in the fence after all.