November 22, 2009
Sunday

Countin’ the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike,
They’ve ll gone to look for America.
                  — Paul Simon, b. 1941
                      American singer-songwriter

Lynn went on a Gallivant this weekend. In celebration of her boyfriend’s birthday last week, they drove from southeastern Pennsylvania to Boston to visit the Johnny Cupcakes store there. Explaining who Johnny Cupcakes is and why anyone would want to go to his store is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice it to say that the trip is exactly the sort of whimsical thing I’ve done myself, to visit a fiction writer’s birthplace or gravesite or spend a weekend on a houseboat off the coast of Bellingham, Washington with a poet. It’s the kind of trip I would have had to lie to my mother about when I was Lynn’s age, and did.

That’s not to say I didn’t worry. A little. I reminded her that a friend was hit by a drunk driver on a clear day at 1:30 in the afternoon, and of the time I was diverted off I-95 as I came home from New England one sunny Sunday because a serious accident had closed the highway. I would learn later that a friend and several members of his family had been seriously injured in that accident. Somehow that made it worse, and more personal.

She allayed my fears by text message and Facebook update. I knew when she was in Connecticut, an hour and a half from her destination. I knew that she had “absolutely just met Johnny Cupcakes!” So when my phone emitted her ring tone (“Singin’ in the Rain”) instead of her text message tone (“Arabesque”), I knew something was up.

In trying to get on the New Jersey Turnpike, she’d become confused and inadvertently drove through the EZ Pass lane. She doesn’t have an EZ Pass transponder, and now she didn’t have a ticket. What should she do? Should she just drive through the EZ Pass again when she exits and she’ll be caught on camera and they’ll send her a bill?

No, I said, that would be a crime and she’ll be assessed a fine. I told her that when she gets to her exit, she should drive up to the toll booth, explain what happened, and ask what she should do. And give her best Jennifer Aniston smile.

And not tell them her mother is probably known in New Jersey as Outlaw Maggy. The link will take you to the story of the time in 2000 when I had to drive through three unattended New Jersey Turnpike tollbooths because I didn’t have any change, all the time worried that I already was in trouble in New Jersey, having never paid a 1995 parking fine in Ocean City. I was going to post the entire text as a “best of” piece tonight, but I see that I’ve written quite enough.

Lynn did as I suggested. The policy on the Pennsylvania Turnpike is that if you don’t have a ticket, you have to pay the whole fare from the start of the road to where you are getting off. That’s the rule in New Jersey as well, and it worked out OK for Lynn because she actually had gotten on at the first interchange.

So I’m glad she’s home, I’m glad she had a wonderful time, and I am so proud of how she sounded so calm and unpanicked when she called for advice. That’s my girl, born to Gallivant.

 

That’s Lynn on the right, her boyfriend Matt on the left. The person in the middle is Johnny Cupcakes himself, dressed as Peter Pan for a Saturday night showing of Hook at his store.

 

The NaBlos of the Past:

2008: I did not post on this day in 2008.

2007: Interlude — The temperature stood at zero when I went out this morning just as dawn was pushing up over the hills above my studio [at an artist residency in northeastern Wyoming]. . . . When I raised the blind . . .  I found frost clinging to the panes at each corner, on the inside of the sash.

2006: I did not post on this day in 2006.

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