The Journey is Sublime

I'd only been back from Iowa about 36 hours when I had to turn around and leave the island again to chaperone a field trip to Portland/Westbrook. Given that the chaperone/student ratio was 4:6, I figured I could duck it, but in the end, I just bowed to my advisor's expectation and got on the damned boat.

The morning of the departure, I was attempting to fix no-bake cookies I had ruined as an offering for library hours (can I just not not bake?), responding as cheerfully as I could to the news I did not get the award, and finishing quarterly reports. In the light of all the work that needed to get done before I could step out of doors and head to the landing for the 8 a.m. boat, I was glad I hadn't really bothered to unpack from Iowa. I would just throw a couple of things in, and hey presto! I would be on my way.

Yeah. Don't do that.

Oh, I had underwear. Socks, even. Just no pajamas. Also, not so much with a coordinating outfit to wear to a matinee kids opera. On the up side, I got to drive an Expedition. Now I hate gas-guzzling ridiculously large SUVs as much as the next person. Normally I would glare at the driver of such a vehicle, and judge them silently for their compulsive consumption of the earth and her resources. I would laugh at their attempts to park in Portland. But, I am also a little woman with Little Woman Complex.

I suddenly like big vehicles, when I get to drive them.

So, aside from the cries and yelps from the back seat, where three of my younger students were engaged in the never-ending arguement that begins with the scream "so-and-so touched me!", I was in a pretty blissful place. Occasionally a song would come on and they would all sing together like seraphim:

"What's going on the floor, I love this record baby,
but I can't see straight any more
Keep it cool, what's the name of this club...
I don't remember, but it's alright, alright... just dance..."

or alternatively

"No one knows what it's like...
to be the bad man...
to be the sad man..."

And it was about the time on the way back home, when the arguing stopped on a dime, so they could all chime in on Behind Blue Eyes, that I knew there was a point to my going on this trip. It wasn't a big point, and epiphany or anything. It was just that I got to have the sublime experience of singing The Who while driving a stupidly large vehicle on I-95 with a clutch of little boys piping up from the backseat. And this song was not from my generation or theirs.

Classic.