#17 / 2003 Tour 2: We set out for the Burning Man Festival

ON THE WAY TO THE BURNING MAN FESTIVAL

#17

I know I’m on vacation, because I see dead armadillos in the road. Twelve hundred miles out we are on the way to the Burning Man Festival via Covington, Ga.; Sante Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico; and many points in between.

Beatlicks Pamela and Joe headed down to Georgia to look up Dana Kemp. Dana is a friend from all the way back to my New Orleans days. Like me, the old folks are gone now and she has inherited family property. We have seen each other twice in almost twenty years, but our friendship still holds up.

Dana and I talked about all the changes we have seen, and how much we turn into our parents. Dana inherited 30 acres of farmland. Today she cherishes all that she hated as a kid: the garden, the weeding, pulling corn. And I, as well, have found value in the little home that I used to be ashamed of, because it was so small and in a blue-collar neighborhood. Now it is my source of income, and the last gift my mother left me. But all this is universal stuff. We all learn it as we go along.

Someone once said, "Any fool can learn from their own mistakes, it takes a wise person to learn from the mistakes of others."

We all learn too late to value our parents. All the things mama wanted to do for me, which I saw as interference, now I can see as generosity.

We are in Albuquerque, spent two days and nights in Sante Fe, and are heading to Grants NM tomorrow morning. There, I will introduce Beatlick Joe to my old friend Andrew. We were friends and co-workers in Anchorage, Alaska. Andrew and I happen to be in the same part of the country at the same time, he lives in Seattle now, so after all these years; this is another person, like Dana, to whom I can introduce Joe.

Dana and I laugh together claiming how wonderful it is to have people in your life who really know you and still want to hang out with you! When I knew Dana and Andrew, I was someone totally different, but we have all reconnected and found the old ties that bind are still intact.