#16, 17, 18, 19 & 20January’s Journey: Father and Son Returns Adding parts of Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida and Terminal Sections 5, 7, 9, 10, and 11
Perspective Prelude
In 2020, when Covid-19 began to leach
Sanity and courage,
And science failed to reach,
The fearful and discouraged,
Son’s remote learning and online sessions
Led to lassitude and many missed lessons.
Mom and he, and a million others in stampede,
That prophecies propelled at frightful speed
To southern reaches, and open schooling,
Warmer beaches and again more carpooling.
The Age of Enlightenment was left behind, and rationality into the dustbin was consigned,
True seekers of truth preferred any kind of conspiracy that through divination only they could find.
The Founding Fathers succored on the Age of Reason
Would not recognize their heirs’ mad season.
This Father and his heir, and Son
Will now down this country run.
A confluence of withheld reasons
Compels a journey in this wintry season.
The time is now, whilst in Father’s company,
For Son to become prologue to their mutual destiny.
While the Age of Sturm und Drang compels an ending tragic,
Father seeks an epilogue to make their meandering epic.
For now, auf Wiedersehen!
That is, until they meet again,
And happily, they see,
That each is in the other’s
Private history.
1. Fraternal Farewell
Older Brother provides a ride to the head of trail.
Whoops! Son says he failed to say one tire has a nail.
Sister stops Dad’s caterwauling, calling to wish the travelers well,
But now there is more work to do before the starting bell.
Sons’ pick-up has waited patiently under a snowy tomb,
So Brother breaks it free from that frozen womb.
While Son collects his clothes and stacks them in the back
Dad unneeded stands stoically and slack
‘Til coaching Son on how to pack
The bulky blue pick-up.
Suddenly the moment for brotherly goodbyes
The fond fraternal hug, a sad hiccup,
Squeezes a few tears from Father’s faltering eyes.
The little boys’ binkies, bottles and blankets and bloated dirty diapers.
Make way for ice scrapers, glacier blue deicer and working windshield wipers.
Citrus from the sunny places, protein bars low fat, bagged with bananas in a bunch,
Are now the healthier alternatives replacing the Father’s former student lunch.
2. Perpetual Preparation
3. Duo’s Departure: Son to Sun
The youngest son to his sunny home at last returning,
Along America’s interstates he and father will soon be journeying.
Alert! Winter storm Indigo is bearing down,
Hurry the final prep, they must leave town.
But the interstates are not for them alone,
Other taxpayers will also be hurrying home.
Forsooth! Before they are barely rolling
The queues of cars begin slowing.
Like ice floes choking a river swollen
First responders surround a driver stricken.
Down in mangled steel, reflecting lights yellow white and red,
Freezing the faces of those gawking for the dead.
As if creeping past an open casket, thoughtful glances are exchanged,
At the scene yellow tape, and orange cones, are mournfully arranged.
The surface tension is finally breached,
As the macabre point is reached
Where they gazed.
And four lanes finally lose their unease,
Vaulting to the velocity they please
Those mesmerized are now unfazed.
Son’s proud pick up in procession, defies death with its combustion,
Consumes petrol for growing power,
Climbs from ten to twenty, forty, fifty, sixty then to seventy miles per hour.
Farewell!
4. Indulging in Illinois
5. “Meet Me in” Missouri
Missouri Welcomes You! To boom land.
Epicenter to the New Madrid Earthquake.
Father turns to Son and says, “You know,
That earthquake tolled bells as far away as Chicago.”
“Dad, look!” Lying in the median is a jack-knifed cola truck.
The tractor trailer’s fall traced through the snowy muck.
The broken hulk no wreck from the earthquake long ago,
No, a victim of last night’s mismanagement in the ice and snow.
Floundered cars and trucks sprinkle the interstate’s sunken median,
Forlorn as if discarded during the quake of eighteen hundred and eleven.
Fresh semi’s fill the ranks undaunted, stolidly passed the fallen they roll.
Flashier trucks pull heated trailers full of stomping equine souls.
With morning energy cars mingle, their drivers not yet bored.
Still striving for greater glory, blazing passed an epic billboard,
That admonishes these chasers for the real earth quaker, “Seek God.”
Motoring inside their mobile heaven on earth, Dad and Son plod on
Until Father and Son a vision see, of a Missouri paradise approaching.
Showing secular Hallelujahs and Fourth of July Amens exploding
Emblazoned with the promise in earth shaking words: “Exit Here for Boomland!”
“Fireworks!” Together they consider what detour their timetable can withstand.
Should they take the offramp? What is to be done?
When someone offers to blow you into Kingdom come?
6. Awed in Arkansas
Father says, “Look, a town called Osceola.”
Far from the old Seminoles, who used to live in Florida.
Chief Osceola frustrated President Andrew Jackson
That “Ole Hickory” who beat the British and their General Pakenham.
Under Osceola the Seminoles roamed free and loose
Until “the Little Magician” Martin Van Buren duped him with a flag of truce.
If Son’s new state be marred by that sad Indian incident,
Then what state in a moral union is not also tainted and complicit?
Father sits up! “Look at that! Son, go slow!
No geographic accident gave this next town the name Lepanto.”
Arkansans must know their religious history.
They named the town Lepanto after a famous Christian victory,
When the galleys of the Holy League in 1571,
Decisively defeated that naughty navy of the Ottomans.
Thus, setting the Mediterranean free
For more holy commerce and Christianity
That paid for Wars of Reformation in the 17th Century.
And timely reformation Arkansans do not postpone,
“War, Divorce, Wealth – what would Jesus say?” A billboard helpfully intones.
Dad says, “That’s a good question.” Son ignores the open invitation.
As Father fumbles for an answer to the twelve-foot inquisition,
Son plays familiar music to ease the thorny theological imposition.
Son selects soothing songs from Dad’s own century,
That Father may mediate more sleepily
Upon this rude Arkansan inquiry.
7. Ptolemaic in Memphis, Tennessee?
While wending back across the Mississippi River
Into Memphis, Tennessee,
Son points out, “Dad see!
It’s the largest Bass Pro Shop in the world!”
Dad jerks his head from the foamy river far below, stares into the swirl
Of whipping flakes and slashing sleet, and intermittent visibility
Between flashing bridge girders bearing them over the gray Mississippi.
Squinting Dad asks, “Where’s the largest Bass Pro Shop?”
Son says, “Under the pyramid, which sits atop the Shop.”
The pyramid camouflaged by snow and white as bleached bone
Emerges from Memphis shining brighter than the limestone
That covered the haggard, dust storm blown,
Mummy homes in the movies we are shown
Here in America.
Father says, “It’s just a giant tent.” No Hebrew lives were spent
To sit it atop this Bass Pro Shop.
So why shouldn’t Memphis, Tennessee have its own pyramid?
When this Commercial Wonder is not a sop to a single pharaoh’s id.
Memphis is as quiet as the Valley of the Kings
Snow piles up like sand entombing everything,
As frustrated as grave robbers, the metropolis gives up the ghost
On plowing, except for arteries they need the most.
Power reduces streetlights to stop and go red blinks
Father and Son slip out of town as quietly as the Sphinx.
8. Muddling and Muttering while Motoring through Mississippi
9. Alabama “Is Just Alright with Me”
Son says, “Hey dad you’ll like this.” He smiles too easily.
Dad sees the traitorous flag flying in the winter breeze.
An Alabama landowner flies the old Confederate banner
A 20 by 15-foot cloth flapping in a most defiant manner.
Who can blame this new traitor of 2024?
When Sherman’s Army of the Tennessee in 1864
And his Midwestern soldiers skipped past Montgomery
The proud first capitol of the late Confederacy.
And denied Alabama of its chance to show its bravery.
The South’s persistent State’s rights platitudes,
Chanted in support of involuntary servitude,
Exasperated Sherman’s Midwesterners.
Sop his sixty thousand angry bummers
Scoured a swath through plantations from Atlanta to the sea
Wider than any interstate.
Alabamans watched in horror as the Union Army
Administered the coup d’ grace to Southern slavery.
And so if a white person can fly the Rebel flag on his private property
Can a black person drive by it alone in lanes reserved for high occupancy?
10. Finally, Florida
Florida! Where Covid Carpetbaggers vent their spleens,
Over Blue State mandatory mRNA vaccines.
And in the sunshine of that State
Expostulate on the merits of Gulf Coast real estate.
While pious in their pews, worshipping the cable news,
Commiserating over border views
Of migrants struggling with little left to lose.
Before basted in boredom they return
Sullenly to the states they spitefully did spurn.
First, they flip those Florida titles to turn,
A tidy profit on their tedious three-year sojourn.
Begun so fervently, and in mimicry,
Of their fabled forebears’ mythic pursuit of precious Liberty.
Maneuvering their overloaded SUVs,
Among their fellow American refugees.
These pioneers piloted confidently, those modern Conestoga wagons,
Until primly bedding them beneath their comfy mini mansions.
Swaggering shelters propped-up and aloof,
“Fear not,” the brokers boast, “They’re hurricane proof.”
11. Terminal Time: Return of the Father
As Father waits, he watches the wayfarers pass through,
Each is seeking solar solace until their time is due.
Father wonders - would he too?
Or what would the thirsty Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon do,
Or think of an average American senior citizen,
Who retires only to expire, conquered by the scorching Florida sun,
When that conquistador himself sought salvation from God’s furtive fountain?
