The unending

When you travel as I travel you come to a place where it feels like you're still traveling, even when you've stopped.

The train wheels move beneath you, the airplane flies over Greenland, the car tires grip as you come around a bend somewhere between Inverness and Pitlochry.

It never seems to stop.

No sooner have I come home then it's time to go on the road again.

Aunt Lois has fallen. She's been taken to a Christian Science hospital in Pasadena. Every one of her 92-years need us. My mother-in-law's a little farther down the road--a rest home in Mission Viejo.

So though I've just come home, I'm off again.

I take some CD's for the drive down the 5. Whatever I can grab in a hurry--Blonde on Blonde, The Allman Brothers, an old Prestige lp with tracks by Sonny Rollins and Coltrane, Bjork because I've just been to Iceland. Lea Ann grabs some almonds and apples and we start driving south.

Roadthoughts dominate, there's nothing better to do than think: the jazz sounds really old, archaic really, and I turn it off after a track or two. Bjork's better, I finally get her though I can only understand a word or two here and there. That's the point, she's making some kind of Aphrodidic symphony, sort of a biomorphic sound-shawl in which other creatures might feel compelled to gather. It works also as background music, as does the work of other great composers. I look at Bjork's website as I drive. The first category on her Homepage is Present/Past. The Dylan, of which I know almost every word of every song, is kind of comforting.

Only the past is vital.

Love doesn't know who it loves.

Aunt Lois is at Broadview, right off Avenue 52 on the old Pasadena Freeway. She's on a recliner, wrapped in a white polyester robe and a blanket. I've brought her a box of See's candy. Lea Ann and I sit and talk with her about the future, what she'll do when she gets out of the hospital. No conclusions are reached, other than it's unwise for her to continue living alone in her big house in Palm Desert.

Just before we go, we ask her if she needs anything. She reaches into her wallet and brings out a coupon she's clipped that's worth a dollar toward the puchase of a new ink cartridge for her printer. She also holds her driver's license in her hand, noting that it's good until her birthday in 2013. We tell her we're spending the night somewhere in Pasadena and that we'll come see her in the morning, after she's had her breakfast.