Ah-Ha!

Did you smell the rubber meeting the road this morning?  Eight tires hitting the highway?  Maybe a dog fart wafting in through the cracks around your front door (Tooga, bad dog!)?  Well, it was Miki and me and the animals three leaving town for a rendezvous with Miki's parents and her sister (Gail) and husband (Rik) from St. Louis (Kirkwood to be exact...since St. Louis tends to encapsulate the eastern half of the state depending on who you are talking to).  The first gathering place...Mackinaw Island, but I digress.


It is now about 9:30 pm as I look back upon the day and it was a looooonng one, from the driver's seat (and the other seats too evidently...ZZzzzz seems to be the common consonant I hear).  Five hundred eighty miles, 10.5 hrs, and a chunk of change for diesel fuel later...the common threads for this day were corn and beans.  This mid western breadbasket we are connected to goes on and on and on.  Field after field, county after county, state after state.  If it wasn't a field of corn, it was beans.  If it wasn't beans, it was corn.  Good lookin' corn too.  Tall, straight (not that there is anything wrong with gay corn), with pretty tassels waving in the breeze.

Kind of hard to tell, but beans are on the left and the corn on the right...
not that the left is more progressive and the right more conservative as
some might perceive these vegetables.

As we pulled into the city limits of Crescent City, Illinois,
the corn was on the right leading us to believe it may well be a
Tea Party town. (sorry, long day)

As we continued down the road, it became more and more clear to me that you can tell a lot about where you are by what you see, as with vegetables.  For another example, I'll bet it may have been a mile or so away when it caught my attention, but there was no mistaking a cross in the distance peaking above the horizon.  When we got right up on it, it was the largest cross I had ever seen (and those of you that know me, know that I have seen a few).  The only conclusion I could logically come up with, was there were some very large Christian people in this town.  Now I didn't spot any myself, but you know they are there...look at this cross.

Maybe, like Guliver's Travels, most of us are just
really small like Lilliputians.

The more I drove on and looked at the world going by me through the windshield of the truck, the more I felt I was becoming more enlightened.  First, how vegetables mimic life.  Then, how giant Christians that make giant crosses are very elusive.  They are not showy, but modest people, that I am sure.


My last eureka moment came as I gradually caught up to and passed a large SUV pulling a modest travel trailer (maybe they were some of the giant cross builders, since they were pulling a modest trailer).  That in and of itself was not the "ah-ha" moment that I seemed to have come to revel in, as the miles ticked by today, but the large number of bicycles attached on the back bumper that screamed "AH-HA!"

Two tiers, 3 on top, 4 below..indicated to me a total of 7 riders...ah-ha!

What did this picture say to me?  First, did the 7 include mom and dad, or was this all offspring?  Either way, 5 kids or 7... really?  What were they thinking?  You are going to cram them all into this smallish trailer and hope all goes well?  I was part of a family of 6 kids and on any given family vacation there were at least 4 kids and two parental units in a station wagon hurtling down the freeway.  On at least one occasion, one of us (Alice) was left behind at a gas station...ooops.  Now I am sure that this modest cross building family was well thought out, planned accordingly, and will not endure any emotional scaring, as some do.  But really, get a bigger trailer!


Having arrived at our destination for the night, we set the air conditioner to "freeze out" and went looking for Lake Michigan.  As the sun set, it made me ah-ha one more time.  The best sunsets occur on the privileged...check out these boats, and remember it is not the size of the mast that matters.

I leave you with the boys basking in the sunset after a good brushing, eating unknown (to us) manna from heaven, and leaving their marks for other dogs to sniff and go...

...AH-HA!

We will say goodbye to Michigan City, Indiana in the morning and head for Mackinaw Island where my emotional, yet educational discoveries will not disappoint.  I feel this "reading" the land and the people thing is becoming more and more intuitive.  If I had only developed this earlier in life...who knows...

P.S.

I am going to try and end each blog with something similar to the closing thought from the Daily Show with Jon Stewart called "Your moment of Zen"... our Zen from the Road came from a billboard Miki saw that said...

"When life gives you lemons...add beer!"