05-DEC-B-3

SET OUT FOR CROSS-MID-WESTERN DECEMBER DRIVING TRIP FOR FRIENDS’ AND FAMILY VISITS FOR CHRISTMAS: I DRIVE THE FIRST800-MILE LIMB UNEVENTFULLY IN FLAT OUT ELEVEN HOURS FROM DERWOOD TO BANNOCKBURN, IL, TO ARRIVE AT WOODFIELD SUITE

December 21—23, 2005

It was a cold day, averaging about 22* F on my dashboard thermometer along the eleven hours of my solo straight through drive from Derwood starting at seven o’clock AM to arrival here in the northern suburbs of Chicago in Bannockburn, checking in at “senior citizen rates” in the Woodfield Suites. I have had time to shower and unpack and wait for the return from the evening’s double header performances at Del Rio and take Cherry, the Corgi out for a brief exercise and pee stop for her stay in the motel suite. Along the way across the Pennsylvania Mountains it snowed a bit, and the overcast kept any of the sun from being bright enough to heat up the ground to melt the snow already on the ground, but I had no weather related travel trouble. The Audi and I were on cruise control autopilot, and I had a full quota of books on CD’s finishing Barbara Kingsolver’s “Pigs in Heaven” and getting three fourths through Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth”—the first female US writer to win the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for literature. I saw few passenger vehicles but a lot of heavy duty trucks, especially the “triples” which I can hardly believe are manipulable by trying to back them up. I presume these vehicles are shuttling the last minute deliveries of Christmas gifts about two thirds of them made in China or India.

This is the longest in time and distance for the three part destinations with the four limbs of the travel to Illinois, Michigan, upstate Lake Erie shore New York and then back to Derwood. The totals of the Audi miles which have been purring along smoothly from the well-tuned machine will probably be just over three thousand, on this Christmas trip, after five hundred on the back and forth overnight trip in the last two days to Norfolk associated with PFP and my presentation of the plans for the Rwanda mission.

I arrived at the Woodfield Suites to check in and await Virginia’s return from the second set she was performing at Del Rio, planning to attend the next evening’s performance, a tradition marking the sixth consecutive time I have come to here the Christmas opera medley and Christmas songs and singers she has organized for each of the last thirteen years.

She is always pushing very hard toward the completion of this year-end gig, with several bounces back home to the church choir and bell choir she directs in Des Moines, so she is usually at “damage limitation” mode at this time to protect her voice and sleep enough to be able to perform. But, she was in good spirits and not so exhausted as to not be aware of others with problems for which she was concerned, such as her college roommate Helen, with whom she had stayed until only the night before. As soon as Virginia had moved out (after getting the last of her grades and other parts of the school year resolved down the wire) unbeknown to Virginia, a big problem had caught up with her former roommate Helen and she collapsed and was taken toe the hospital where she will stay for five days in acute alcohol withdrawal. She was also focusing on others with a good deal of energy invested in the multiple balls juggling in the air, with a good deal of the old joie de vie back in full spunk.

We made a couple of shopping trips for presents for nieces, getting just the right match requiring the undressing the manikins in the shop window of the Gap. She had also put in uncounted person-hours in crewel needle point assembling my Christmas present—the “stocking to be hung by the chimney with care.” I had a bunch of stocking stuffers to present as well. The Woodfield Suites was a good venue with a pool and hot tub, treadmill exercise room and wireless internet access in the room for my laptop. We also stopped at a small art shop where she could get presents for each member of her choir from a place run by a friend, and then went north to Kenosha Wisconsin to visit her sister Kate and family. Just at that time, the group that were coming up form Iowa to attend the Del Rio show in the fully packed reservations backed out, so her sister Kate, her husband Bob, and the three kids—Griffith, namesake Virginia, and Caroline—made instant switch in plans to attend the early set that evening in Del Rio. The first time I had met them was about six years ago when the kids were little and hard put to sit through a full session in a restaurant, but now they are all grown into teen queens with Griffith a cross-country buff on his way to University of Wisconsin toward a political career after graduation this year form high school. The two Virginias had gone west in the Dodge Ram pulling the trailer with Porter to Colorado this summer. It was good to see Kate again, who is recovering from a split Achilles tendon repair, while also being a senior graduate student in a sociology degree program. Their newly remodeled house has a “consultorium” sun room where she can carry on her consultation practice of counseling male abusers of females.

It was a good low key visit, with lots of warm memories and moments of reflection. There will be further rendezvous in the near future, so we will have a chance to serially carry out some of the wish list of plans for some service to others as hoped for in many of the therapeutic moments, such as those shared with Cherry, the “Therapy Dog” Corgi who is a coquettish bundle of irresistible charm.

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