The More Roads We Travel

I was born wanting to go places. My mother reports that I toppled my cardboard bassinet in the newborn nursery while thrashing around. She believed I was trying to break free. I walked too early as well, and had to wear special shoes affixed to a metal rocking plate because my legs were not yet strong enough to carry me.

But I also traveled in the conventional sense with my family. I remember our drive to Florida, specifically drinking orange juice at the state welcome center and throwing up as I stepped off the Mad Tea Cup ride at Disney. I recall the trauma of getting lost once while away, though I’m not sure where we were when it happened, and taking photographs of my feet on the beach in Caesarea during our first trip to Israel.

When I was old enough to travel on my own, I seized any opportunity to explore locales both nearby and far flung. Luckily, my husband shares my sense of adventure. In the early years of our marriage, even when we lived on a shoestring, we still found a way to go places. We occasionally went abroad, but mostly went to off the beaten path spots close to home and checked out as much of our own city as possible.

And then we had children. Their blessed arrival cut nights out down to zero, and we were really fine with that. But we agreed that we would not suppress our wanderlust, no matter how complicated traveling with the boys might get.

We flew together to Croatia to visit family when our eldest was 8 months old. A year later, I made the same trip alone with my son. My back ached as I carried him, his car seat, the diaper bag, my carryon, and my purse onto the tarmac to board our connecting flight from Zurich. Yet I delighted in the experience of being there with him, even as he soiled his diaper just before takeoff to the chagrin of the buttoned-up business man to his left.

In fact, experience has been the point from the beginning. We wanted to pass along our curiosity to our sons, and we believed that travel was the ticket to ensuring that their world view broadened beyond their own four squares. Besides, it gave us an excuse to continue prioritizing what we loved. We went wherever and whenever we could. But when we couldn’t go far away, we took the boys on closer adventures, like the gorges in upstate New York or to a zoo the next state over.

About ten years ago, we happened upon the idea of an annual road trip across the US. A road trip’s flexibility appealed to us as a young family, especially the way it allowed for spontaneous stops along the way. As a new American, my husband wanted to see his adopted homeland and its northern neighbor. To my own shame, I’d been to Albania, but had never been west of Madison, Wisconsin.

The decision launched what has become the defining experience of our family life. We’ve piled into our minivan nearly summer since, with the exception of our trek to Seattle (we flew on expiring miles) and two road trips in tiny cars while visiting relatives in Europe. We’ve gone as far and wide as Vancouver, BC and Maine, Mt. Rushmore and the Green Mountains, Disney and Amarillo, Texas. Our goal is to visit all 50 states and the 10 Canadian provinces (maybe even the territories, too). We’ve made it to 38 and 6, respectively.

Loved ones and acquaintances alike often wonder how we’ve managed with our noisy, messy brood in the car. After all, they’ve seen the boys in action out of the car. Portable DVD players – since replaced by Apple products – always helped, as did rattles, action figures, crayons and activity books when the boys were much younger. We’ve never underestimated the busy potential of a crunchy snack, and we’ve often pleaded with G-d to please, please, please make the boys nap.

We’ve managed potty training, scream-inducing ear infections, precarious car seat escapes, stomach bugs, sibling rivalry, teenage orneriness, and a flat tire on the NJ Turnpike. There have certainly been “Don’t make me stop this car” moments, yet I always say these trips are like childbirth. The gross and the horrible recede from memory once we’ve pulled back into our driveway.

In the days before our recent trip to the Canadian Maritimes, we had to face the hard truth about our minivan. It has given its all for 12 years, but it was no longer up to a ride of several thousand miles. The boys are also growing up and we don’t know how much longer they’ll be able or willing, given their own lives and plans, to come along for two weeks each summer. Perhaps the van’s retirement was a metaphor for the end of an era.

We quickly suppressed such thoughts and accepted that we were either going in my husband’s 5-seater or we weren’t going at all. Wholeheartedly, our three boys, whose legs are far longer than mine, squeezed into the back. Some of the luggage went beneath my feet in the front. It was cramped, but that did not obstruct our view of the wonderful things -- both manmade and created by G-d – we saw along the way.

Like our other trips, this recent journey offered family bonding at its best. The boys may have found a way to wrestle even while stuffed into the back seat, and they got mighty loud. But they enjoyed priceless, uninterrupted togetherness with one another and with their parents. That the trip further fed their curiosity about the world and nurtured their ever-growing sense of adventure are bonuses I wouldn’t trade for anything.

Please, just don’t ask me about the state of the car.

No Mistakes, Just Experiments

I love the liberating sensation of being out on the wide open highway, especially when I’m driving alone late at night. It’s almost theatrical: streetlamps light the asphalt and memories of old personal dramas take center stage, edging out my usual mental clutter. Right one cue, I start thinking too much, mostly about roads not taken and mistakes I’ve made along the way.

Only the classic rock station – a pleasure I’m denied when my eye-rolling sons are with me -- keeps me from sinking entirely into melancholia. Instead, the songs provide the perfect soul-searching soundtrack and my singing takes me to a younger, unwrinkled place in time.

While on the way home from a wedding a few months ago, I was in the throes of a great song and a slightly embarrassing memory when a garden center billboard jarred me out of my flashback. The sign, which has boasted the same special on arborvitae and lawn statuary for years, offered this to ponder instead:

THERE ARE NO GARDENING MISTAKES. JUST EXPERIMENTS. 

Noooo, I thought at first. But later, I conceded that yes, in gardening, it’s true. I’ve uprooted enough unruly plants to know that gardens give us as many chances to get things right as we’re willing to give ourselves. At that moment, however, I was unable to take the message at face value. Metaphorically, the billboard was wrong.

After all, we’re human. We fill up on mistakes like we’re loading a shopping cart at the market. And in parenting, oy, all the more so! We don’t have the time to cover the moments I wish I could do over with my children. But I’ll mention here only that I’d definitely listen better to what my then young boys were shouting with conviction from the timeout chair and I’d stop myself before offering unsolicited advice to my teens on their summer haircuts.

Our wise sages and holy books teach us to forgive one another our misdeeds. We are enjoined to judge our peers favorably, to always look for the silver lining. Once a year, we spend an entire day recounting our transgressions against G-d and His creations in pursuit of a clean slate. But when we awake the next morning, we are likely to trip over the inability to absolve ourselves.

I forgive my boys quickly, and they forgive me, too, in the miraculous way you do when you love someone unconditionally, and the infractions aren’t terrible. In fact, they don’t even remember that I ignored their timeout rants for the sake of my hearing (and my sanity). I’ve continued to self-flagellate anyway, pounding away at my own heart.

But this summer, everything feels different. I go to sleep each night with hopeful prayers on my lips, only to wake up to news reports of new losses and heightened fear, as if we could ramp up our angst any more. Not even a good song has managed to numb my sadness for long. It seems like an opportune time to quit the concept of foolish regret and throw my energy elsewhere.

I, for one, believe that a garden need not be masterful to be beautiful. Case in point: the $1.60 investment in seed packs I tossed haphazardly into soil containers in May. Despite my lack of careful planning, they have still produced a lovely array of simple flowers bursting with happy colors in pot after pot along our front steps.

And yet, I have learned more, changed more, from the singular packet that produced nothing. I gave it the same watering attention as I did the others. The same sun shone down upon it day in and day out, and yet, it remains a brown jumble of empty soil. Still, I leave it there as a reminder that one dud does not diminish the glory of an entire garden nor the essential goodness of our own well-meaning souls.

It is that row of flower pots that has kept me afloat this summer, enabling me to see something splendid through the fog of my tears. I cannot walk past them without admiring their petals. I pause, too, to thank G-d for the sun and rain that made them blossom so bravely in a world turned on its head.

In this way, I stumbled upon the broader wisdom in that gardening center billboard. Human error is inevitable. Imperfection is an essential part of our fabric. “Experiment” is just code for easing up on ourselves, because our mistakes are not the problem. It is by dwelling on them after we’ve settled our debts that we keep ourselves from moving forward.

Better to spin our missteps into a series of “We tried, now let’s try again” opportunities. Even better, let’s recognize our fallibility as a fount of chances to set things right, to repair the world, or to get as close as we possibly can. Better still, let’s cherish our blessings and pray for peace, and for some peace of mind.