Time Travel Travelogue #1: Aisha's Journey (as List)

Tucson. Wichita. St. Louis. Detroit

1. I throw away a full container of lukewarm milk at the gas station just before we get on the 10 to leave Tucson. My dad threatens to fish it back out. This cross-country journey is off to a great start.
2. A two hour long car jam in Phoenix is spent listening to Outkast sing "Spottieottiedopalicious." I say, "Dad listen to this lyric. Did you hear it? Let's hear it again. I mean, this is brilliant. Don't you think? Did you hear it?"
3. Hundreds of miles later, dad ejects the Outkast CD from the player while uttering, "Ooooooh kay then." We are floating through the dark down a near-empty highway out of Texas, toward Oklahoma. Headlights appear alone at the top of a hill in the rearview, and the curve of the road is coasting up behind us like we are a dipper in the sky. Dad puts in a CD of his own. Opera plays with windows open while red lights skinny as acupuncture needles flash on and off outside some sort of factory or plant to the left.
4. Lovely late night poolside walk with the dog around a cheeeeeeeeeeeeap motel with caution tape "decorating" the thin metal posts that are, I think, keeping it standing.
   
5. Wichita? We don't talk about that.
   
6. My father speaks of meeting and not meeting the photographers he admires near Parisian parks and in Manhattan high rises when the men were at the end of their lives. The topic of our conversations is often mortality.
   
7. Late lunch at an outdoor restaurant in St. Louis. As the dog splashes around in the koi pond, we see actual groups of real black people for the first time. The meal is a ridiculous extravagance: blue cheese and steak sandwich for me, a savory crepe and beer for dad. Why? Because of the chemical smell of gas station food we were being poisoned by.
   
8. Pushing it, we drive through Chicago after midnight with three hours to go...
9. In the middle of the night we get to Kalamazoo and are rewarded by the first gas station thus far to sell the New York Times.
10. The city is quiet. An empty, yellow tunnel turns into Jefferson and we are blocks away from the first house my father bought, where my mother waits.