Life Through Glass

We had a Chevrolet station wagon, several actually, over many years, and my parents, with their brood of tow heads spent many miles on the road. We summered there, and also moved every year or so, changing schools, houses, friends, places. We traveled across the country, through Montana, even up to Alaska where my dad was stationed. Those miles in a tightly packed car with six kids and a cat or two made me ache with curiosity.

I wondered what was up a road or in a distant canyon. I wondered what the places were like, what the stories were of people who lived under the mercury lights over farms at night. But as fast as they came into view, they disappeared. And the next scene presented itself, offering the same questions.

I learned to see life through glass, to stand back and let people and places slip through my fingers like scoops of sand at the beach. I learned to stay in the background, to imagine what things might be like. I learned to play it safe, to protect myself from losing things and people.

Since then I am most comfortable moving. I don't like to stay on one topic or in the company of the same people for more than is temporary and comfortable. I don't get involved.

That's become something of a problem now that I live in one place, sleep with one woman, work at one job and have living, breathing sons. It takes some work to step out from behind the glass and walk into the scene, up the road, and into the canyon where I meet what I have most wondered about -- a life lived in one place, beyond the distractions of always moving, changing the channel, on to the next town or big thing.

My shrink once told me that I lived a tentative life. I thought that really sucked, but that it was true. Tentativeness was possible because I believed that I could, and would, always move on. I saw no point in getting attached to anything, to stepping out from behind the glass, out of a lazy life and into one that would slowly kill me with roots that overtook and outshone the wonder of what might be.