Lookit: Barnes and Noble Galleria is hosting a reading by Robert Sullivan, author of the aptly-named CROSS COUNTRY: Fifteen Years and Ninety Thousand Miles on the Roads and Interstates of America with Lewis and Clark, a Lot of Bad Motels, a Moving Van, Emily Post, Jack Kerouac, My Wife, My Mother-in-Law, Two Kids, and Enough Coffee to Kill an Elephant. (Check the NYTimes review.) It’s worth noting that Sullivan is a contributing editor at Vogue… a magazine I can better tolerate now that I’ve read the “Age Issue.” (You, too, can be “Vogue at any age,” but first check the depressing essay about being sixty in the back of the book.)
In any case, the real reason I’m interested in Sullivan’s travels is that, Man, have I got a hankering to go on a road trip! I’m tired of sitting in my office–which, yes, is actually just a cubicle and, despite how many cheery photos I tack up, it persists to be as gray as the skies were this past Monday night. I want away from my computer. I want to sweat it out in the car for so long. And I’d very much like to have along my high school friend Mary. After all these years, she and I still share a taste in music and we’ve even memorized many of the same lyrics. This is what makes an ideal road trip companion–someone to groove with! We’d probably pass the time belting out Joni Mitchell songs, trying like hell to hit those high notes. Coincidentally, this is the same friend who passed me a copy of On The Road in and about eleventh grade.
Sullivan’s book contends that these road trips are something we Americans have in common with one another. Meet me there if you care later for a long, lingering drive up I-35 and then into Wisconsin on 70. We’ll hit every bar stop along the way.
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