Borrowed Words

I have enjoyed keeping this blog...I love words. A lot of time and thought goes into each post. ~and, I am sure later today as Chip and I cross our wake, an emotion will take my pen in hand and right words will indeed come to me. But, for now I would like to borrow some words from John Steinbeck, an excerpt from "Travels with Charley."

"When I was very young and the urge to be somewhere else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked. Four hoarse blasts of a ship's whistle still raise the hairs on my neck and set my feet tapping. The sound of a jet, an engine warming up, even the clopping of hooves on pavement bring an ancient shudder, the dry mouth and vacant eye, the hot palms and the churn of the stomach high up under the rib cage. In other words, I don't improve; in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear my disease is incurable. I set this matter down not to instruct others but to inform myself.

When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find himself a good and sufficient reason for going. This to the practical bum is not difficult. He has a built-in garden of reasons to choose from. Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination. And at last he must implement his journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. This part of the process is invariable and immortal. I set it down only so newcomers to bumdom, like teenagers in new hatched sin, will not think that they invented it.

Once a journey is designed and put into practice, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip, a safari, an exploration, is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has a personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person unto itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I feel better now, having said this, although only those who have experienced it will understand."