Daddy never drove by maps. He learned to drive back before the first World War and there was usually only one way to get anywhere so you didn’t need maps and during the war they took down all the sign posts so if they were invaded the invaders wouldn’t know where anything was.

          If we had to be somewhere, we’d set off in the general direction – west or southwest – and go about fifty miles or so and then we’d stop some stranger and ask, Do you know how to get to ???? from here? And the stranger’d give us lefts and rights and landmarks and we’d keep on going until we forgot and then we’d stop some guy and ask again or pull in at a gas station and fill up on air and stale cheese-peanut butter crackers and ask the guy pumping gas.

          He might call over somebody else and they’d confer while we ate our crackers, maybe had a coke out of the red flip top ice cooler. They lean down to the window and point down the road or maybe sometimes, back the way we’d been but daddy didn’t like to do that. He’d rather circle around as if forward motion was all that mattered, the old Chevy thumping along until we got where ever it was we were going or dead ended at the ocean waves crashing on the beach and all the sign posts gone to war.

                        red lines on roadmaps
                        everything goes
                        through the heart

          We all sit around looking at the Sunday papers talking about the Bicentennial. It’s Daddy’s 80th birthday and the conversation turns to when he first felt old. Daddy says at 50 he gave himself another 20 years or so and now he’s figuring 4 or 5. I say Grandma lived to 97. He nods and figures 3 more would be a 100 and that would be 1996. Another 4 would be 2000. “Nice to see the new century,” he says.

          My sister says 40 was the worst and at 50, she didn’t know where the time had gone, she was just 50. I’m heading fast for 40 and it’s when I’ll face my own demons but I don’t know that yet.

          The new millennium will come. Daddy will be 104 and I’ll be 61. My daughter will be as old as I am now; perhaps she’ll do my portrait to hang in an ornate frame. My son will be a paleontologist thinking about bones and fossils; he’ll hardly notice time passing.

          We’ll all sit around reading the Sunday papers, talking about the turn of the century, about when we were young, about when we were old.

                        by the door of the
                        abandoned farmhouse—
                        lilacs bloom