Most of my life, I have lived away from my extended family. This means that there were seasonal trips, varying in hours of length, along highways back to where family lives. As a little girl, sitting in the back seat of our car, I would watch the street lights go past. Light, fade, fade, light, fade, fade, light fade, fade. There were stretches where those carefully placed lights seemed to form another roadway above us.
Last night, out in the fall rain, the pavement caught the light of lamps, car lights, and windows. They reflected back up into the light autumn rain, creating a haze that if you watched carefully would show you specks of color, pulses of light. It brought back the idea of highways of light to my mind. Sitting there, buckled into the back seat of my parents car, those light posts looked as if they were stretching out the foundations of a dual path, a roadway made of light.
I have a lot of great memories of those trips, the lights that seem to make their own road above, and the adventures we shared along the way. One of my favorite memories is the trip we played the "McDonalds" game. You would have probably have been about seven or eight, it was a fall trip, perhaps a Thanksgiving weekend. At that time in our lives we lived close enough to share those special holiday events with our extended family, and would pack up our car and head toward "home" and the family that awaited us.
ReplyDeleteTraveling from Willoughby Hills, east of Cleveland, Ohio, to the Dayton, Ohio area for one of those extended family visits, every time you called out a McDonald's sign, off we would go, down the exit ramp, for a quick visit to the Golden Arches. Tucked snugly in the back seat with your blankets, stuffed animals, books, and a 30 pound border collie named Lady sharing the seat, you never missed seeing the large highway signs for McDonalds and had so much fun pointing them out.
McDonald's was giving away their famous game pieces, and when you peeled back the little paper that came fastened to your drink cup, often there was a prize for a free food item. We would get whatever we had won at our next stop, buy just enough to get a new game piece and on we would go! A box of animal cookies here, fries at another stop, then coffee for your dad, (I was just a diet Pepsi girl still in those days), a burger here, and then an apple pie at another stop. Most of the time we just went through the drive through.
It was such a fun way to allow us to break up the fairly short (five hour) drive, which had a way of seeming like forever to you, buried in the backseat, and still too short to see more than the large road signs, such as the McDonald's yellow M. I'm sure we treated Lady too. She was our first child, you know, for five years before you, our human child was born. (Being a Narnia fan, I'm sure you will understand our affection for this border collie child we had adopted when we first married, but that is a story for another time).
As it came to pass in the days before cell phones were in common use, and the trip took a bit longer than normal, we had your grandparents on both sides wondering what was taking us so long! We did this trip in the day time, without the reflections of the roadways of the night. But perhaps, later, as I know we traveled many trips in the evening hours of the fall and winter darkness, as you watched the lights above, you had fun remembering the adventures of the day and our visits to the Golden Arches.