Salon.com > Driving Miss Sadie

A cross-country road trip complete

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:13:00 +0000

The last leg of Sadie’s and my trip, from Chicago to New York, was the most familiar. I’d done this route, or a variation of it, dozens of times in my teens and early 20s. I never passed up the chance for a road trip back then.

My first trip, I was only 17. The family of one of my best friends was moving to Bethesda, Md., right after our graduation. So he and I and our mutual best friend, a funny teenage triangle, drove one of the family cars east. My mother had just died, and I knew with certainty that she never would have let me make that trip alone with two boys. She loved those boys, she knew they were good boys, but she could rarely get beyond appearances. My grieving, distracted and much more open-minded father, on the other hand, gave me his blessing. It was the first tangible result of my mother’s absence, and it was good and bad. I was free; I was also unmothered, untethered.

We bombed across Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana and into Wauseon, Ohio. The desk clerk at the roadside motel wasn’t sure what we were up to when we asked for two rooms, but made sure I was the one getting the second room, by myself (I was). I could hear the noise from the turnpike, and I didn’t sleep well. Suddenly I didn’t like the way freedom smelled: like the disinfectant they used in my mother’s hospital room on top of old cigarette smoke.

Returning to Chicago three decades later

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

My previous dispatch from my cross-country road trip driving Miss Sadie to New York left off as I headed to a baseball game – my San Francisco Giants just happened to be in Chicago, and I’d bought great tickets, between the Giants dugout and the bullpen. It turned out to be the perfect place to marvel and kvell and lament and celebrate my life since I left Chicago, not quite 30 momentous years ago.

Chicago isn’t technically along I-80, but I had to make the detour, since my trip west to San Francisco 28 years ago began there. I knew I could stay with my friend Jim Rinnert, who has an amazing house with his partner Brent. Long ago they gave me an invitation to stay with them that wouldn't expire. Jim and Brent are dog people – they always have several adorable, eccentric rescues, and they were excited to meet Sadie. “You’ve always been a dog person – without a dog!” Jim tells me once he sees me and Sadie together. It's true -- I loved Jim's dog Bo when he used to take him to In These Times. The company of a dog compensated for the sometimes delay in paychecks. And Sadie utterly loved Jim and Brent.

How baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 18:01:00 +0000

Well, it was another day of my cross-country car journey with my dog, Sadie, with stops to throw the ball. Before I explain how baseball saved me from Rush Limbaugh, first a Sadie update: She misses Boulder, but found nature in this little patch of land behind La Quinta:

She thought this drainage ditch was another creek and made a run for it (I put her back on the leash):

One stop came in lovely Newton, Iowa, the childhood home of Charles Murray – I won’t hold that against Newton -- as well as Maytag headquarters. We had Sunset Park to ourselves in a cold rain:

So, at one point I broke down and listened to Rush. You know, even the paranoid Sean Hannity sounds a little jauntier. Rush actually seems depressed. He was inveighing against Michelle Obama comparing herself to Hadiya Pendleton, the 15-year-old Chicago girl killed in gang violence in January. Obama’s speech was incredibly moving; NPR played long clips of it and she sounded as though she was fighting tears; listening to her, so was I.

In Nebraska: Old friends, “Mad Men” and chatting about divorce

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

I feel I’ve failed you again, dear reader, in that I’m not discovering roadside kitsch or figuring out why red state people like their guns or (sometimes) think Obama wasn’t born here. This weather spooked me, and I’m driving crazy fast when I’m driving.

It was hard to leave my friend Mary’s house Wednesday morning once we heard there was going to be snow all day across Nebraska. Both fireplaces were lit, there was coffee and muffins, Sadie was happy with her pack, the gorgeous Golden Retrievers Max and Malie, and I was headed to Nebraska? Why?

A word about Mary. I met her through Open Salon, she was one of the fantastic originals, and we connected through our writing right away. She came to our crazy Salon party at the 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, where Glenn Greenwald and Duncan Black cavorted with Joe Klein (no, they didn’t cavort, although they were all there) and Arianna Huffington came for a minute and left her lovely sister Agape while she departed in a limo for dinner with celebs (which was all good) and Gov. Ed Rendell dropped by and a bunch of Open Salon people came and they were pretty much my favorites. There was Dave Cullen, of course, my writer on the Columbine school shootings, still a year or two away from his award-winning book, and I’m sure there were other people, and then there was Mary.

A much-needed post-Hannity snow day

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 22:41:00 +0000

As part of my ongoing road trip across the country with my dog, Sadie, I planned to spend two days in Boulder, but wound up with no choice in the matter: We’re socked in with about a foot of snow. I tried to race the storm to Boulder on Monday, but it found me in Evanston, Wyo., when I woke up yesterday morning.

I complained in my last post that it’s been hard to meet people since I’m averse to leaving Sadie alone in a hotel room. But in Evanston I met a drunk welder in a cowboy hat as soon as I checked into my dog-friendly Best Western. “Hey, good lookin’,” he said, and I can state categorically that I was not good looking at that moment: dirty hair, no makeup, boots still salty from our trip to Bonneville Salt Flats.

(Oh, here’s Sadie, before she got salt poisoning.)

“Gun Talk Radio” vs. Mormon women priests

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

I lost KNBR’s Marty Lurie just outside of Patrick, Nev., Saturday night, after the San Francisco Giants game, and that's when I first felt alone. Leaving not only my friends and (some of) my family, but my baseball team. My only regret about my amazing autumn in New York last year was missing the Giants’ world championship run (except for a game in Detroit, but that’s another story).

On the dog park campaign: I found a great one in Auburn, Calif., along with a great meal at Lsuda’s (hindsight: had a good turkey sandwich; should have had a salad. Lots of steak to come.)

Development keeps hurtling at you as you cross from California to Nevada. Outside Reno there was a sign for a law firm: “Bankruptcy Walk-ins Welcome.” Around Sparks there was a DUI billboard. And then it got kind of empty.

About 10 minutes after I lost KNBR a sign said “No services 57 miles.” And even though I didn’t need no services, I felt untethered.

I’m on the road!

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:32:00 +0000

“A dog is a tragedy,” a maudlin New Yorker growled at me over drinks after I first arrived in the city last August with my dog, Sadie. “You get them knowing they’ll die before you do. Unless they don’t.” Buzz kill, huh?

I never meant to be a crazy dog lady, partly for that reason – I didn’t want to love someone I was pretty much guaranteed to lose -- but I have become a dog lady anyway. It turned out, after my daughter left for college, that I am a person who needs the tether of caretaking. I liked the cooking and cleaning up, the dressing and the driving to school, the daily bustle of family, where someone else has to come first. For the first time in 24 years I lived alone and I didn’t like it. So I moped for a while, and then I got a puppy. Now, at the time of life I’m supposed to be grateful for my freedom, the capacity to travel the world and come and go as I please, I can’t. And it turns out that’s fine with me.