Your Trip Down This Road May Start Sooner Than You Think

Going somewhere, anywhere has always held a strong attraction in the psyche of the people of the United States.

We walk, we bike, we drive... somewhere and everywhere. To every corner of this country, and to points all over the globe. We even shuttle to space, and rocket to the moon.

It's the road.

The road is a metaphor and the road is real.

We begin our journey on the road the minute the doctor slaps us on the ass. Some of us stay put in the same city that we were born in, and some of us move to any far corner.

No matter what we are traveling, even if you never leave the house you were born in.

For me the road is in my head and under my tires.

I've spent many years traveling the roads of the Midwest. Often, I'm in too big a hurry to slow and look at things, but in recent years I stop. I'll talk to strangers, walk city streets, sit along the banks of rivers and lakes.

I don't belong in these places. In small towns they know this. In cities I'm invisible.

I am dumbstruck sometimes at what I see on the road. I see copies of copies --that is, Applebees after Wall-marts after Starbucks. It's boring road with that. But I also see the road that is right there for everybody to see if they look. The shop that hangs a clock in the door saying "out to lunch", the tiny department store that has old style mannequins in the window, that is celebrating 125 years in the same location, the restaurant run by the woman who lives down the street, the victorian style county building in the middle of the town square.

It's all there on the road.

I've seen and bad people on the road and I've seen friends that will not point you in the right direction, but lead you down the sidewalk and around the corner, even though you have never met them.

Which brings me to Oprah.

I never watch Oprah. She cries too much. And I never know which Oprah to expect: big O or little O. But what Oprah says, goes. Most people think Oprah is Hapro spelled backward, but I know better. On the road I've been past her studio in Chicago. It's kind of a palace. Oprah is "god" spelled backward. When the Oprah of any size endorses anything, I flat out refuse to watch or buy it.

She makes em and breaks em, though. That's undeniable.

Most of the time.

Sometimes they exist despite her.

Because I'm on the road so much I get audio books. I don't buy them, because they cost too much. I go to the Oak Lawn library and get them. You just can't listen to the radio when you're in the car as much as I am. Not AM, not FM. Not nothing.

The library has a decent selection of audio books. They are donated, mostly. I don't think they buy new.

I'm running out of selections. Last week I glanced at one book and passed it buy, then decided to go back and get it. Some lady at that exact same moment decided she was going to examine every stinking title right in front of my selection. To get it I would have had to nearly molest her from her toes upward, so close was she and her nose to the titles on the shelf.

I waited.

Finally she moved and I got the audio book, "The Road", by Cormack McCarthy. I had recognized his name from a previous book I had rented, "No Country for Old Men". It's soon to be a major motion picture, as they say.

I listened to the Road. It was bleak at first, about a man and a boy trying to survive after some kind of horrific event that wiped out most people, plants and animals, and which left the earth pretty much dust and dark.

It's an allegory. The road is something to travel down, but in the end it is something to stay off of. The road kills the father. It's kind of a suffering, redemption and resurrection story, a kin to the New Testament.

Oprah --god, if you will -- had the little old man on who wrote the book last summer. It was his first television interview. He did okay. He doesn't need Oprah on his road.

The book has sold millions. I think it is going to be a movie too. Had I known that this was an Oprah favorite I would have passed. I still wish I passed. It can give you waking nightmares, McCarthy's road.

The road in "The Road" is a stark contrast to the road I travel on, both physically and in my head.

It's scary.

Because it may come true. Soon.

I'm wondering if I would be ready to go down the type of road in Cormck McCarthy's book.