Jumping to the present day, my cousin and I once again did a big trip together, but this time, with cash for hotel rooms and a GPS. It was different from our 1975 driveaway car from Philly to Los Angeles in every possible way. But then again, we are 60, not 25.
Ten days, two hotel rooms, two cousin's spare bedrooms, Hilda the GPS, waitresses in VA, NC, and PA, fast food places (Huddle House?) and Cherokee diners (one living with a tree through the roof, one dead), the Cherokee res with signs in English and Cherokee, my cousin's roots search (Aunt Billie was 1/16 Cherokee, if we did the math right), two old ladies named Evelyn who did not remember who I was in 1952, my sacred objects, coolers and a food scale, mountains, cousins (city mouse, country mouse, all mixed up now), Kendall and Steve, Silkie the reliable 1998 Corolla, summer, fall, and winter within three days, Ed Pavel and his magic shoes, deer hunters for Jesus, Warren Wilson College and Preston Cottage, where Angela Davis posters have replaced little three-year-old me saying "I'm gonna be hungry and thirsty all the time!" into a tape recorder.
Finding Dad's thesis at home and digging out his answers to a Columbia Teachers' College alumni questionnaire from 1993 . . . "List publications:" His answer: "Only free lance." There is a gene that he got from his mother and I got from him, with that "only" judgement, killer of a simple, happy life. If you're not the best, if you're not Famous, there's no point in trying. This idea is planted by someone telling you this falsehood early in life, and you internalize it without knowing. My writing this blog is a Bronx cheer in the face of that ancient Protestant ethic US competitive judgement. One's task is to produce and love and find out what pond is the one where one can be recognized and grow, not one that is out of one's reach. There are lots of happy scrapbookers out there, and lots of miserable, suicidal Phi Beta Kappas.
What follows is a day by day accounting of Asheville Trip, 2008.
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