I was born and raised in Chicago. I’d visited other cities, flown to Buenos Aires (where my mother is from), and driven in forty of the forty-eight contiguous states. In 1998, while I was thirty, I received an offer to manage a restaurant in Beverly Hills. It was the impetus for the trip of my lifetime. After considering all the pros and cons, and unable to come to a resolution, I talked to my dad about it. He convinced me to go. I wasn’t married, had no kids, wasn’t bound by a mortgage ... there was nothing keeping me here except fear of change.
We packed my Jeep Cherokee with what little clothes I had and set out on March 29, with plans to arrive in Los Angeles on April 1. (We didn’t believe in bad omens.)
We drove south through Illinois, leaving the city behind and surrounding ourselves surprisingly quickly with acres and miles (seemingly oceans) of wheat and corn. We drove until dark and made it to Tulsa, where we were greeted with a downpour so severe we feared the roads would wash out. We made it to a motel off the highway and by the following morning, the skies were clear.
My father had been a bus driver in Chicago for twenty-seven years before retiring two years earlier. He was more comfortable in the driver’s seat than most people are as passengers. He encouraged me to watch the desert roll past, to enjoy a trip I might never get to make again. We set out by 7 a.m. and made good time, reaching Gallup before 6 that evening. We had dinner in a cafe near a railroad depot, watching the trains come and go before falling asleep, exhausted, by 9 that night.
The next morning, we woke early and by that afternoon, we were sitting in LA traffic. Our trip had started in one of the biggest cities in the world, and ended in another massive metropolis. But along the way, we saw some of the most open spaces America has to offer, and the vastness inspired us to talk about bigger things, the biggest things, topics we touched upon when I was younger but had never discussed in any depth: the relative shortness of life. The nature of love. The true meaning of family.
My father flew back after a couple of days, arriving in Chicago before the Cubs played their home opener.
For a month I called home every day, a little homesick, a little delighted at my new city and my new life. As I became more comfortable, the phone calls diminished, and by the end of the year, we were talking once, maybe twice a month. I saw my dad again in January of 1999. He has become sick during the preceding months, a deterioration I didn’t witness. He was no longer the same person. The man who had sat so confidently behind the wheel of my Jeep for three days had been replaced by a frail, distracted, and gravely ill man. He passed away a few months later. I miss him every day, but I cherish most the memory of him at the wheel of my Jeep, as we wound our way halfway across the country and opened up in ways that a parent and child rarely have the chance to.
