Mergansers – Mom and the Kids

Dan blew into town on Sunday and I picked him up at the airport. It was amazingly only 75 °F at one in the afternoon. He had already scheduled luncheon and dinner dates with friends, so I didn’t spend too much time with him after I brought him home. As he pointed out though, “Dad, we’ll have plenty of time together tomorrow”, tomorrow being today, Monday. We’re driving to Michigan today, just like those prominent Saint Louis families of yesterday’s post or 1901, depending on where you are on your relativistic spot on the space-time continuum.

Driving straight through to the cabin is a grueling drive, thirteen hours. But when I think about it this drive is no worse than the drive we use to make to Dallas, when my folks lived there. As I was driving north through central Illinois, Anne texted me. Since I was driving, I handed the phone to Dan, so that he could answer. She wanted to know where we were, so Dan told her, “On the 57 just south of Chicago”. Because he used the LA-ism of referring to the highway as “the 57”, as in “the 405” or “the 5”. Anne guessed that he had answered and not me. When I told Dan that she had identified him, he was a little self-conscious about it. Then he retorted that his native LA friends always find it humorous when they leave LA and see minimum speed limit signs, because there aren’t any of those in LA.

Passing along the southeast edge of Chicago-land, we ran into a little traffic. I noticed that the west-bound lanes were empty and thought that they had been detoured for construction. Then I thought with dread that I would have to navigate this detour on my way back home. I had just gotten my head wrapped around that thought when a brace of police cars came swooping by me, west-bound. I then had thoughts of the “405”. Finally, a motorcade cruised by, with every light flashing. After a Google search, Dan determined that it was Joe Biden going to lunch.

Back in the day, during the Clinton – Bush campaign, my office had a ringside seat of the passing motorcades. We were on the road that connected the highway and the airport. Back then, Missouri was still a battleground state, so there was quite a bit of politicking going on that year. We use to count the vehicles in the motorcades. Clinton always had fifty-some, while Bush’s was in the seventies. Today’s Biden motorcade only had about twenty-something cars. Anyway, we made it and we’re at the cabin again.