Rambling Fever

Everyone needs a moment to put work on hold, abandon the mobile, and stealth away for space and peace.  I'm not sure how you carpe diem, but my wife and I have found that we do it best by adding miles to my Jeep and transporting ourselves into an altered state that feels like vacation, even if it's just a day trek down the blacktop. The best part of traveling with my wife is that she reads to me while I drive. Although she insists that she does it simply to enrich us, I know she started doing it to keep me awake. Actually, the practice accomplishes both purposes. While keeping me alert behind the wheel, she has read to us novels and biographies, autobiographies and sermons. We've made friends in literature from slaves on antebellum Cane River plantations, to an Episcopal priest in a small town named Mitford. This Sunday afternoon's drive began according to script, the second installment of a political autobiography that my wife started on our last adventure, but the return leg later in the evening contained a twist. As I drove (wide awake I might add), something moved my soul and I burst into a poor rendition of a favorite song from my teenage years, Merle Haggard's "Rambling Fever."  My wife was startled, partly because it wasn't pretty, but mainly because it was more than slightly out of character. What ensued was a couple of hours of something like "Name That Tune."  We sang John Denver hits that shaped my youth. We laughed through the best of the Beach Boys, including one I sing often to our grandchildren: "Oh, I'm long tall Texan, I ride a big white horse..."  Kenny Rogers made our memory hit parade, along with George Jones, Dolly Parton, and others. You could write a person's biography with the lyrics they memorize through the years and still remember. The most telling part of the experience is what we revealed and learned about each other, and what we remembered about ourselves. Having loved and lived with each other as best friends for a number of years, there's still so much to explore. The whole experience reminded me that all of us are works in progress. We may reach mile markers and milestones, but none of us have fully arrived or ever will. Perhaps that's the point of humanity after all. To be fully human is to be in process; sometimes straining forward, other times pausing, but all the time growing. "But we shall lovingly hold to the truth, and shall in all respects grow up into union with Him who is our Head, even Christ" (Ephesians 4:15, Weymouth New Testament).