my daughter, turning fifteen, decided that what she really wanted was to take her boyfriend halfway across iowa to adventureland and spend the day there. i being the father and all would drive. they were all grateful to me for doing it; actually i'm not even complaining. going halfway across iowa is fun for me. it triggers all kinds of memories, though.

about an hour into the state you come to iowa city/coralville, where i worked and lived for eleven years in the seventies and eighties. but in fact my history goes beyond that. when i was a young child of about four or five, my parents would bring me to iowa to visit grandparents - my dad's parents in des moines, and my mom's parents in ames. it would have been along this same road. i would have been in the back of a station wagon.

the day was beautiful, a somewhat cloudy day threatening to rain but never really raining except a couple of random sprinkles. in fact we were worried about it being rained out, but we weren't - everything went fine. the daughter and her boyfriend got to cuddle in the back seat for almost three hours while i, seemingly deaf and almost blind except for what i could see in the mirror while not watching the road, left them alone. the sights of iowa were enough for me. the rolling green fields, barns in a distance, corn almost knee-high already, exits that were more than familiar to me. the only problem was that it was much more crowded than it used to be. i had to pay attention to my speed and not getting too close behind trucks but going around.

my daughter is hispanic and since she's fifteen, i probably should have had an entire quincenaria (sp.) for her. but as you can tell, i can not even spell it reliably, much less know how to pull one off, and her friends aren't hispanic so it would be a wild shot in the dark if we were to even try it. her older sister, also hispanic by birth family, actually ran away on her fifteenth birthday, or near it, but she also wasn't even aware of what it was or what it should mean to her. no, this daughter was happy, and i was too, doing at least something for her birthday that would count in the great book of martyring fathers.

though it was the day after her birthday, it was actually my parents' anniversary; they had married on june tenth, nineteen fifty, seventy-three years ago. my mom was from ames; my dad des moines, so i was coming upon their old stomping grounds as adventureland is in altoona. at the amusement park, i had no end of people-watching, with everyone looking vaguely familiar, but iowa always seems that way, and this set was younger and pretty much out of the range of anyone i might really know. everyone was nice, though, and of course the kids had fun. it was all decorated up as a 'tourist' village - very painted and quaint. i kind of liked it, but mostly because i could just sit and watch people, and remember times past.

in one of those times, in the middle of winter, the road was slick and i had my young daughter (actually now the oldest of all of them) in the back, and the car slid on the ice until it was facing backwards on the interstate. luckily, there was no traffic and we very gingerly just turned around and got back going the right way. it just so happens that there's this very windy patch around newton somewhere, and this time, when driving through newton or somewhere near there, much to my surprise, i saw a whole field of windmills. but the biggest surprise was this: cruising along the interstate, with relatively crowded traffic (more, at least, than i remember from my times there), i saw a truck that was actually carrying a brand-new subway car, slick, modern, and the same width as an interstate lane. wild!

this is, after all, the new york to san francisco interstate. anything going from anywhere northeast usa to anywhere else, will inevitably go through here. and coming home we stopped in coralville, which always was just a huge strip mall, and re-experienced it. now it's a modern strip-mall, but still a strip-mall. they are widening the interstate around iowa city/coralville and the whole thing is one huge construction zone, where, while i'd rather look out for familiar old sites, like moss' dairy or j.j.'s trailer park, i have to concentrate on the road just to get through it alive. in coralville i resisted the impulse to say to my daughter, "i used to work there," or, "i used to have a job where i drove on this road every night in the middle of the night." we saw those places; i felt that, but it would be meaningless to her.

some of these memories, then, were more than sixty years old, while others were more like forty or fifty. i knew that it wouldn't be the same, not in every way anyway. i now have trouble reading the counties off the iowa license plate, because the letters are small and narrow and half the time they're covered up by license-plate holders.

the last thing one does, upon crossing the mississippi at the quad cities, is dip south for the final forty minutes of illinois before one gets to our town, galesburg. this little stretch of road is as beautiful as iowa, but the road is much quieter, gentler, and i've come to know it well. it is now strange to me that, for all those years, illinois was busy, crowded and dangerous, and iowa was green and quiet and peaceful, whereas nowadays it seems to have been reversed. nevertheless i still love them both, and was happy on both sides of the river, if only for different reasons.

my reading and writing is slogging a little; i write this story as a break. soon you will see about my new book though, a book of quaker plays. chau!