Things I (re)learned on my trip to Massachusetts

That it feels good to know all those dot matrix printers are still put to use at car rental companies all over the country. (“Initial here, here, here and here...”)

My affinity for shuttle drivers.
I love that there is someone who is willing to take me through and to places I would not want to navigate on my own. I once took a shuttle between LAX and Long Beach, or maybe it was the other way around...? Anyway, I was so relieved that I had made it on my own as far as I needed to. I smiled the rest of my way along the cozy, high ride amidst the dizzying maze of freeways that is southern California, someone else at the helm.
The driver was a cheery kind of Cheech Marin character and at one point while traffic slowed, which it did most of the journey, he leaned out the window and leered at a souped up caddy with shiny spinning hubcaps. Impressed, he called out to the driver, pointing at his fly detailing, “Hey, man! Donde se venden?” (Translation: Where'd ya get 'em? Literally: Where are they sold?”)
This was a man who paid attention to the road, who had a real interest in the varities of his discipline. I appreciated that.

Why I don't have a TV and that I adore the innocence involved in my wide-eyed son rushing into the bedroom after arriving at his grandparents' house to announce “Grandma and Grandpa have a movie screen!”

That the last time I consumed this much Olympics I was pregnant with Isaac and it was a Michael Phelps year.

That if they had actually sold fashionable winter boots like I saw in the stores now when I was a kid, I might have worn them...and liked it...and been warm...and happier...and a guest on Oprah by now...Okay, at least the first four.

How hard it is to walk away from $40 rain boots covered in skull and cross bones, shaped like cowboy boots, with a killer fat green heel. (Honestly, they rocked. The description doesn't do them justice.)

How I so know my sister will have some comment to make about the $40 rain boots covered in skull and cross bones, shaped like cowboy boots, with a killer fat green heel.

How serious my son's determination is when it comes to creativity and hard-core imagination.
There is a Lego Duplo set in my in-laws basement which consists minimally and mysteriously of one base block (green), two trunk blocks (yellow and brown), a palm tree and leaf fronds, a parent and baby dinosaur, and another yellow block with a picture of strawberries on it.
According to the picture on the box, this is a complete set. Of what, god only knows.
Isaac can play with it for hours, designing an unbelievable variety of configurations and scenarios: The dinos piggyback, the baby eating from the fronds. The strawberries mid-trunk, each dino sniffing about. The dinos attached to the green base (aka skateboard). Etc. etc. etc.

That if I lived here, my poetry would likely become filled with icy rivers and maple sugaring. That I do not know how sap rises in the trunks when the weather warms above freezing for enough days in a row, or what it is collected in and how. That I am so ignorant of the world.

That being away from home for a week and a half feels like an eternity until you arrive back and it feels like you never left and you eventually discover that the world outside the confines of the airport mini-universe and 35,000 feet below your delayed air cruise, has continued to turn and there are no urgent emails waiting as you feared because you are a writer and a teacher, not a neurosurgeon or a teenager, and so you simply pick up where you left off in your staid routine and no one throws you a party to help you contemplate what you've taken away from this journey, so just like the saying, if you want it done, you have to do it yourself, sometimes in the form of a blog entry.

That the OED word that means to make the sound of waves is Undisonant.