The Long and Winding Road

My niece, whose arrival in this world, I swear, my sister just called me last month to announce, is graduating from high school this weekend. Thus, on Friday, I made the 8-hour drive (solo, since Bob had to work all weekend) to my parents' house in Virginia, so we could all drive down to North Carolina together for the big event. Back when I was in my early twenties, I used to love to take long road trips. I could have put together a box of tapes, climbed into the car, and happily driven from Seattle to the Florida Keys, barely giving it a second thought. Nowadays, I seem to revert to my six-year-old conviction, which was that on my list of horrible things to have to do, a long car ride ranked right up there with going to the doctor for vaccinations.

I carefully put together a collection of about 20 cds, representing a wide variety of music, everything from Ella Fitzgerald to The Magnetic Fields to Elizabethan lute music and George Jones and Tammy Wynette. I'd been on the road for a whole two hours when I began to wonder if I'd unknowingly been slipped some acid or something when I was making this selection of what was obviously some of the most boring music ever written and performed. I passed a Walmart, a place I never shop, and was tempted to stop to go buy something new and different. I'm glad I didn't. I might have had a difficult time explaining to Bob upon my return why we now own The Lollipop Tree, Tubby the Tuba, and Bobby Sherman (all favorites of mine circa age six) cds.

This was also around the same time I began to get hungry and to be in need of a bathroom, so, naturally, I hit the point at which one lane was closed for paving, and we all sat in traffic for about half an hour. This gave me time to think about what I wanted to eat, which was, of course, a Whopper, Jr. I didn't have to read Fast Food Nation to be someone who never eats at fast food restaurants, ever. I know Burger King is one of the absolute worst, that the planet has been devastated by the company's need to farm and slaughter billions of cows, but then, I remember how my mother used to occasionally pick me up from kindergarten and take me to Burger King for a Whopper, Jr. (actually, it was for half a Whopper, Jr. back then) as a huge treat and that the only thing that ever broke up the monotony of a long car ride in those days was a stop at Burger King. To hell with the cows and the planet, I wanted a Whopper, Jr. I also wanted a bathroom. In fact, even more than a Whopper, Jr., I wanted a bathroom.

Did you know there are practically no Burger Kings in the entire state of Pennsylvania? I didn't, either, until I was trying to find one. Every exit had everything else under the sun, just no Burger Kings. My stomach was doing battle with my craving. By now, it just wanted to eat, and it didn't much care whether we were eating Whopper, Jr.'s or cows' eyes and nostrils (which, of course, by the time I was ten, I was wise enough to know had been ground up and put into Whoppers and Big Macs along with a couple of rats for added flavor). My bladder wasn't being too picky, either. She was trying to convince me back when we were sitting in traffic to just pull over and run off into the woods, but my imagination, which had pictured some huge greasy-haired, tattooed, and toothless truck driver following along behind, had reined her in. I gave in and pulled off at a McDonalds.

Have you ever known anyone who had trouble finding parking at a McDonalds? I mean, even when every (quite obviously, extremely imaginative) teenager in my hometown used to hang out in the McDonalds parking lot, no one ever had trouble finding a parking space. This time I thought I was going to have to get back on the road and drive to the next McDonalds, but just as I had almost circled the place twice, I spotted a car pulling out and grabbed the space. Enter McDonalds, where the reason for the lack of parking became abundantly clear: a birthday party with about 30 five-year-olds and their mothers in attendance. Normally, I feel extraordinarily guilty when I walk into a restaurant, just use the bathroom, and leave, but waiting half an hour for a hamburger is not what I'd call "fast food." I told my stomach to shut up as I climbed back into the car. This was destiny. We were meant to eat at Burger King, not McDonalds.

We finally hit a Burger King in Linglestown, PA. This was highly appropriate, as Linglestown sounds like something out of the jolly parts of a Bass and Rankin Christmas special. I'd been mocked and shunned by my peers for my musical tastes, and realizing I'd never fit in, had left on my quest for the Whopper, Jr., traveling across the treacherous closed-lane highway, inhabited by the Evil Mr. Road Rage, and had finally arrived at Linglestown, the home of the only Burger King for miles around. I had one last hurdle, though. The Burger King was planted in one of those mega strip malls in which you can see it shining brightly off in the distance, but the maze to get to it keeps leading you to parking lot barriers that keep you from getting there. But I made it. I got there; I got my Whopper, Jr., the cold Whopper, Jr. that left me feeling queasy during the rest of the drive down to Virginia, my stomach reminding me this hadn't been his idea.