Ladybug and I ended up taking an impromptu road trip before through northern Durham and Orange counties, driving some roads we’d never driven before. It seems irresponsible to take a drive just for the sake of taking a drive, but that was something I loved doing as a kid. My parents got divorced when I was twelve and my father moved into an efficiency about a mile and a half away. That wasn’t very far, but it sure seemed like a million light years away at the time.

I didn’t see much of him during the week, which in retrospect doesn’t make a great deal of sense, since he was so close. But every Saturday, we got to hang out. We’d usually start with a trip to the comic book store, then lunch at Houston’s, where my father would draw cartoons of a suicidal dog named Chuck on the cocktail napkins. Maybe we’d wander over to Egghead Software, but more often than not, we’d hop in the car and set out. He was usually pretty cool about letting me choose the music, so I spent more than my fair share of Saturdays buckled into the passenger seat, listening to REM or They Might Be Giants.

We’d drive just to drive. There’s not much highway in Maryland that we didn’t cover, and a fair bit in Northern Virginia. I know a couple of Saturdays, we turned around when we hit a state line, and on rare occasion, we’d head on past them, venturing into Delaware or West Virginia. I always wondered if we drove so far because we didn’t really have anywhere else to go, really. We’d usually end up back in his efficiency around 6 PM, in time for microwaved hot dogs and Star Trek, and I’d read comics for a while before we’d go to bed. There was no pressing urgency to get back from driving, and I don’t remember my father ever saying, “Let’s go home.” It was always, “Let’s go back.” I wonder sometimes what would have happened if I’d said, “We should keep driving”– how far we would have gone, where we would have run out of gas, what reasons we would have found to go back if we got far enough away.