In his heyday, before ass cancer laid him low, Dad was a hell of a driver. He was a rock. Unflappable. When I was twelve we drove “through” a traffic crash as it was unfolding. The cars ahead of us bounced off one another. Another car smashed into the median. Yet another spun off the shoulder. Somehow – in the middle of all the smash and boom – Dad yanked the wheel left. He yanked the wheel right. Brakes. Then he powered through a space between the sliding cars. In the span of seven hard heartbeats it was all behind us.

There was no “HOLY SHIT! Did you SEE THAT?” There was no relieved “Thank you, God!” slump into the steering wheel. He didn’t even shrug. His expression never hardened. It was just back to business as usual. We may as well just have driven through a car wash.

Dad is/was as cheap as I am. He’d drive all day and then drive all night to avoid paying for a hotel. No radio blasting. No window down and head sticking out to blow lucidness back in his brain. Just pedal down and power on. His countenance was soft concentration and long focus. He was a machine.

We once did a freelance job in Detroit together, making a video production for a company that built machines to convert sheet aluminum into HVAC ductwork. We worked like dogs on the factory floor all day, setting up lights. Setting up shots. Interviewing the Floor Manager for the process notes we’d need to write the Voice Over. We broke production after a ten hour day. Dad drove downtown toward the Ren Center to score a good steak dinner even before we looked for a hotel.

“You’ve never been out of the country, have you?” Dad asked me.

“Nope,” I answered.

“How about after dinner we drive through the Canadian border to Windsor and fart around for a bit? You can say you went to Canada and maybe bring back a Canadian souvenir for Ian.”

“That sounds great!” I yawned. I was completely exhausted from the long day. My head slumped against the passenger window.

We never made it to the Ren Center. We never made it to Canada. Dad saw me collapse and, while I was out cold, he turned the car south and drove twelve hours back to Saint Louis. I blinked awake in the night to hear him thunking the last few squirts of gasoline into the tank at a Shell station. Then back to sleep. From time-to-time I’d stir; sit up and look over at Dad. Dad would look back at me and smile. I remember that smile. It was a specific smile. It was smile that said, “I’m fine. You’re fine. Go back to sleep. It’s all good.”

When I think through the reasons I love my dad, that signature driving smile of his is always at the top of the list.

“It’s okay. I got this. Go back to sleep.”

I must credit Dad for my night driving genes, but I’m still not the driving machine that he was. Last week we did the seventeen hour bonsai run to Central Florida non-stop. Both ways. My Beautiful Wife took a four hour shift in the early evening hours so I could recharge my brain for a long overnight while she slept.

In the wee hours of the morning, navigating the twisty dotted lines between the major interstates in Southern Mississippi, my coffee-addled brain did a lot of thinking in the dark. I thought about my writing projects. I thought about my marriage. I did some financial ciphering to figure out how much we’re going to budget for Christmas. And of course, I thought about my dad. Every time MBW rustled awake during the night, she practically shouted, “Are you okay! How are you?”  I guess it’s a mother’s autonomic panic response to go from REM sleep to taking inventory of the truck’s safety profile.

I tried to smile at her the way my dad smiled; reassure her that I was fine and she could drift back into dreamscape. Apparently my reassuring smile is yet another pale imitation of The Man.

MBW’s game is to load up the iTunes with songs about whatever state we’re driving through and sing the (daylight) miles away. This has evolved into a full-throated schtick. We must sing our respective male-female parts from Johnny and June’s Jackson, as well as Conway and Loretta’s Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man. If I don’t sing my part “with feeling” I have to sing the song over again until she’s satisfied. She solos through the entire catalog of Alabama songs. I’ve got Memphis in the Meantime and Walking in Memphis. Good thing we’re alone in the car. The way we sing, a passenger would surely roll out the door and take their chances hitchhiking through the swampland.

This time it dawned on me: There are no popular songs about Arkansas. Wasswiddat, Razorbacks?

As for Thanksgiving at the M-i-L’s, it was a nice holiday. She’s dating a Canadian guy, so our Thanksgiving was kind of a multicultural affair. That’s cool. Turkey Day was just “different enough” to qualify as an adventure, and not an annoyance. Salt pork with the vegetables. Okay. No bigs. It was tasty. Her Newfie BF is a nice guy. (NOTE: Apparently “Newfie” is pejorative to those from Newfoundland. Really? That’s like “Scot” being an insult to people from Scotland. C’mon.)

I binge-watched the Grand Jury drama on Cable News, the way I knew I would. Thumbing up and down through the cable news channels is the thing I miss most being a cord cutter. It was surreal to watch my own town burn through camera lenses eleven hundred miles away from the couch on which I sat. Forced perspective.

The weather was absolutely delightful. I am one of those people who has zero bullshit romance for winter. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. I could move to Florida and never look back. You’d never hear any bullshit whining from me about, “Oooh, I’d miss wearing sweaters! Oooh the first snow is soooo beautiful! Oooh, I have to live in a place that has four seasons!”

Oooh shut the fuck up. Winter sucks. Dong. Here, take my sweaters and stick them up your ass, says the man who snapped his ice scraper in two as he tried to chip his windshield wipers free from their frozen cocoon this morning.

The downside of the trip is that we had to kennel the dog. I don’t mind putting the dog in a kennel. I very much mind the $45 per day cost of the kennel. Had I known that MBW signed the dog up for an additional play session at a cost of AN ADDITIONAL $25 PER DAY, I would have been sick to my stomach for the entire trip. I was queasy about the thought of $45 draining from my pocket every day. Little did I know it was actually accruing at $70 a day until I got back and went to pick up the dog and pay. I could have choked MBW. I was livid. That put a big dent in our Christmas budget. Grrrrr-r-r-r.

Daisy is depressed. I don’t understand. She did the same thing last time we kenneled her. I don’t think she’s mad at us, per se. I suspect that she really got used to massive playtime with a crush of other dogs and the kennel trainers, playing hard and getting lots of attention. Maybe she had a “summer camp romance.” All I know is she’s laying around in a wistful stupor and ignoring me.

While in Florida I was skimming Drudge headlines and saw that Sony Pictures had suffered a massive hacking. I cringed. My company is Sony’s internet provider and I’m on the Network Security team. I knew back at the ranch the emergency emails were flying back and forth. And so they were. We’re still digging out today and I’ve got a pile of work waiting for me to start hunting pirates and mending relationships with our customers in California.

Better get to it.

Hope you all had a great holiday with those you love.