Painting the Golden Gate

Ruby wanted to drive to San Francisco last week, and I can't blame her.  I completely relate to the restlessness that the existence of San Francisco can create.  The gleaming bay is right there, just at the other end of I-80.  And it IS possible to get there from here in roughly the time it takes to finish your homework, brush your teeth and get a good night's sleep.  You could, technically, be looking straight up the towers of the Golden Gate Bridge in a few short hours, inhaling the misty scent of eucalyptus, thrilling to the gastronomical possibilities of that hilly city, which are right in front of you because you just got in your car and drove.

And yet, you're here still, even though you COULD leave.  It makes a person restless, I tell you!  What makes it worse is when you look at your calendar, framed in as it is with classes, rehearsals, lessons, things you have to be present and accounted for.  Your windows of time are like portholes, tiny ones that you can't see the whole picture out of.  Ironically, your life is like the Golden Gate Bridge, or rather the maintenance of it.  Is it true that the bridge is continually being painted, and that by the time the painters reach the far end, it's time to start all over again?  It's true here in this Sisyphean suburb, where it's time to pick up kids just as soon as you've dropped them off.  Time to eat dinner just as soon as lunch is digested.  Another kid throws up as soon as the recovered one goes back to school.  And you know that the minute you finish a stack of homework, more will magically appear in its place.  It will never end, ever.  The completion of a task seems to create another task.

While you're pushing that big rock up the eternal hill, you wonder what would happen if you let it roll down.  Maybe you'd be free, and then finally, you could get in your car and drive west, to see if it's true what your grandfather Opa told you in 1978: "That big road that goes as far as the eye can see?  It leads all the way to California."  He had a bad case of wanderlust, Opa did.   I remember so well his face when he said that, squinting out into the horizon, telling me stories of "'Frisco,"  It's an old-fashioned word that always reminds me of Opa.  I thought he was just a story-teller with some good material.  Now I understand that his restless soul stretched as far as that road, into the distance.  I was one of his cans of gold-orange paint, one of the many reasons he didn't just let that rock roll down the hill and go to "'Frisco."  He and Nana Ruby had their adventures, to be sure, but mostly they stayed here to roll on that paint, coat after coat, for their children.  That's why I remember Opa.  He was here.  He didn't set down his paint brush and walk away.  He knew where his treasure was, but he also never stopped dreaming for a second.

I think Opa would approve if Ruby and I just took one tiny road trip...