As I drove into the parking lot, I saw two travel buses, the sleek kind, black with silver trim and tinted windows reflecting the glimmering sun peeking through the clouds.
I was happy to find a parking space adjacent to the building where I was to teach my class at Campbellsville University. I gazed at those two buses for a moment before heaving my backpack across my shoulder and heading up the stairs to teach my class. The buses were transporting student-athletes, no doubt. I saw a man, I assumed a coach, making sure the mammoth vehicles were ready to roll.
It was a Friday, and both the classes I taught that morning were lower in attendance and in energy than usual. Later, when I walked to meet with a student, the campus looked sleepy and vacant, like college campuses usually do on Fridays when there’s not much happening on the weekend.
I mentally revisited those buses and how they had been idling their engines when I got out of my car. The smell of diesel had ignited in me a hankering to hop aboard.
As a kid in grade school, my heart beat a little faster when I boarded the charter bus carrying football boosters to the high school team’s away games, which were always on Fridays. Later, when I was in high school, I would board the team bus for our away games. Although I was never a college athlete, the sight of the buses on campus that morning tugged at my travel strings: I wanted to go; it was Friday.
Sometimes you just want to go. It’s like you have an inner transmission that cries out for you to put it in drive and step on the gas.
Maybe it’s grounded in a fear of being left behind, or perhaps it’s a yearning to explore, that Odyssean desire to discover, to blaze a trail.
As the underground poet Charles Bukowski, expressed it “I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it.”
I continued to analyze my feelings: yes, COVID has restricted travel. Yes, I was tired. Yes, the weather was warming up. But, my emotional thermometer wasn’t registering a temperature.
Sometimes you just want to go.
Some people are more anxious than others to hop aboard and go.
Our son, Harrison, was one of those who always seemed to have an itch to go.
“I’m going to the store,” I would say, and immediately Harrison would pipe up, “I wanna go.”
“Wanna go for a walk?” I might ask Lori, and out of nowhere, we’d hear Harrison, “I wanna go.”
Maybe we would be dreaming aloud of a “getaway” somewhere, and if Harrison were within earshot, we would hear the echo, “I wanna go.”
I used to say, “Harrison, you’re always sitting on ‘ready.’”
Sometimes you go, just to go, with no particular planned destination.
I chatted with some friends the other day. “We just took off, drove out West, ended up seeing the Grand Canyon,” they told me.
And I wanted to go: west, towards Arizona, or northeast towards Niagara Falls, or northwest, maybe to Wyoming, or maybe, south, or east, anywhere and nowhere in particular.
I just wanted to go.
I rushed home and had Lori check to see if our spin had won the Winnebago on Wheel of Fortune.
“No,” she told me, “and I’m not sure I’d trust you to drive anything bigger than your Camry, anyway.”
“That’d be okay,” I said.
“Wanna go?”