The Things I Have Avoided

I have avoided this post for three years.

I went to bingo one night in August with my best friend. We stayed late and at around 11PM, I drove home with my children sleeping in the backseat. The summer had been an awful one. My store died its agonizing death earlier in June, and I’d spent the last few months depressed, my brain totally off. On the way, we passed a gas station that was usually closed, but this night, open and filled with cars. There’s a storm coming, what else is new? Worried, out of town Northshore suburbanites freaking out about some rain and wind. I went home and we all went to bed.

The next morning, Saturday, I tried to take my son to karate. 9AM and the streets are packed, and I notice drivers that I pass have a frozen look of panic. It was an utterly beautiful day. Not a cloud in sight.  I walk Max in and the instructor tells me, “We’re closing. We have to leave. We’re all going to die.” A little dramatic. It’s becoming Mutual of Omaha on the streets, though. So naturally, I go to the grocery store, where I find people buying it out of everything they have. Ice cream, even.

At home, I freak out to my husband who in his ever-calm-and-slightly-amused-at-my-antics demeanor, thinks I’m nuts. Naturally, we also have no local TV because at that time it cost extra with Dish Network and it just wasn’t worth it. Who the hell needs local TV? We decide, however, that we will leave. It should take us, what, two hours to get ready? He argues to pack three changes of clothes, and I relent because it’s just not worth it.

Six hours later (oh wait, did I say two?) we leave with two dogs, two cats and two children in the backseat that want to know why we have packed up our house, and why can’t Max go to Kindergarten again on Monday? We promised him he’d be back for Wednesday. He’d started Kindergarten a few days before and ultimately, he would not see it again for months. 

In traffic, we pass a single older woman in a yellow dress with a parrot in her front seat. A frightened couple with two extra shaggy retrievers in a station wagon and not much else. Families with every generation represented. Everyone with the same face, the same taste in the back of their throat, the same realization that this time is different.

We stop at rest stops along the way, so many times we lose count, on the way to Memphis. The dogs have to pee, Ava is potty-training, we just need to take a deep breath. There are hundreds of people at every one. Again, the face. People are talking with one another, sharing snacks, cigarettes, travel plans. Others are hovering with the cell phones, convincing the person on the other end it’s time to leave, my God, I don’t care that you survived Betsy and have a few cans of Dinty Moore and some water. You can’t eat batteries, mother.

We arrive in Memphis hours and hours later. We chose Memphis because it was familiar, it was far away and the hotel had a mini kitchen and accepted dogs. We are given coupons for free hamburgers from Backyard Burgers. We are completely made fun of when we go redeem them because we were vegetarians at the time, and vegetarians in Memphis is like … vegetarians in Memphis. We were roundly made fun of by the people behind the counter for ordering the Black and Bleu Burger, no Burger. Hysterics. Crazy assed white people. We eat them in the parking lot quietly. We cannot talk.

The days pass like madness from there.