Route 33

Route 33
A few miles east of Batavia, N.Y.

This view, this setting, this memory, all are etched into my soul.
Countless journeys on this road as a child, traveling from Williamsville, then Clarence, onward to visit my great aunts, Laura and Virginia, uncles Joey and Butch and great-grandmother Celia in Greece, just outside of Rochester.

My grandmother, sister to Laura and "Gin" forbade her husband, grandpa Tony from using the faster, more efficient Thruway; that anonymous interstate created in her middle age, that destroyed her timeless sojourn to visit her siblings.

It took so much longer and my grandfather despised it...but submissive as he was (not easy for a fellow "dominant"), he lost out to the immense fortitude of his nemesis in life...his wife Margaret.

This road, tranquilized that tension and instead found in me a peace and a solitude I would carry for fifty years onward, growing in me as a legend would, unconscious yet followed everyday.

My determined and almost insane dedication to following a path less traveled...even as it strayed from my own prosperity and "good", sometimes to my dismay...began on this road and with the dogged determination of my "Nana".

I truly discovered a life less hectic, less stressed...a life...as the miles of open road, rolled by abundant cornfields, cows, tomato stands, grain silo's, and railroads, less used and becoming abandoned. Somehow, within the mind of a seven-year-old in 1967, a seed was planted that says, "here lies what once was, yet still is...that falls away from the craziness and speed of so many, so starved, so in need of something...that they travel faster and faster, chasing shadows they think they catch, only to find a profound emptiness at the end.

Those few times Grandpa Tony would travel with me to Greece without Nana Margaret, we took the thruway. As we did, I never missed route 33 because a child's anticipation is on the destination, not so much the journey. Yet though I was so happy to arrive at Uncle Butch's small home greeting "Sammy and Kelly" the dogs and Grandma Fusco and the overwhelming scent of olive oil and sauce emanating from the cramped kitchen...something was missing.

The journey there.

And this happened so often, it became hard-wired into the developing mind of a child. Connections were made. Compare and contrast...without really thinking about it.

And it took decades to discover the answers; the meaning, the purpose...the unsettled agony of my seeming self-sabotage so many years...climbing ladders to become "successful" yet getting half-way up and realizing, no matter how large the pot of gold is at the top, it is not what I want...it will leave me empty and always looking back at how I got there...and realizing it wasn't the road I wanted to travel.

I finally realized, after so many, many years the journey is my soul...the journey is my being...and getting there is not worth getting there if the journey was only a means and worse...the road traveled by so many others...missing the scenery along the way.

I finally realized why I love my bicycle so much...why it is as much a part of me as my arms and legs, heart and soul.

It travels with me...slowly.
It forces me to earn my journey.

It is not an excuse to not live...to not move forward...to instead lay back and watch the rest of the world go by in some sad rationalization to cease to try, to lie down and give up.

On the contrary...it asks of me so much more than a degree in molecular biology, or a doctorate in engineering or a corporate ladder. Its demands on my mind and body and my answers to it never end. The bicycle and my journey make me cry as I never have, laugh as I never could, try as I always will...harder and harder...faster...yet never so fast as to miss the scents of cow manure and corn, mingled together in a symphony of what life is all about; confronting me with pleasures and discomforts that, in the end...are a rhapsody of beauty that can never be described in words; that can only be felt and never conveyed.

I live on my bicycle because of my journeys on this road so early in my life, forced upon me from a grandmother that understood, yet didn't...why this road, this journey...this slow crawl meant so much and was so vital to the final destination.

It is the road that I saw, along with my father, as he lay on his deathbed at Kenmore Mercy Hospital, October, 1992. I looked into his reluctant eyes and in my mind, we meshed. Suddenly I saw him as a child in Batavia, back seat with Margaret and Tony up front...long before the thruway was built...and they traveled route 33 to visit Laura and Gin...and "the boys" in Rochester.

My father's partially shaved head, lay on that stiff hospital pillow; the cancer having invaded his mind. His speech terrified me because it was slurred by the demon within, yet his eyes brought me to this road...this journey...and together we both realized...all the work...all the planning, all the immediate need to "get there" left a void, a chasm and though he couldn't explain it in words; the cancer along with life, robbed him of that...he communicated it to me so clearly...so passionately...

...the journey is more important than any destination in this world.

Now, my father was about to leave this world and as he prepared for that, he channeled to me the journey he left so many years ago...that long slow road, a road that asks of you so much and so much as one's fleeting time...yet gives back in ways that only a mind about to leave this world would truly understand.

I left the hospital with that dormant seed planted so long ago, beginning to sprout. Its roots gathered deeply in my soul. I often went to bed at night with visions of cornfields slowly passing me by, an old farmer standing in a ramshackle hut on the side of the road...with fresh tomatoes and corn...that old blind man who sheltered in a dark dwelling selling mushrooms to Nana Margaret.

None of these visions filled my wallet...none of them brought me glory, none showed me a worldly wealth. Yet they have me here now, realizing why I travel the way I do.

Somehow, this world in all its insane convulsions toward the toys and acquirement of things designed to bring joy, so short-lived that ever-increasing doses are needed to get the same joy...left route 33 intact. That road still eschews the efficiency of the interstate that so often parallels its course. Like me, it defies the rational idea of "getting there" in a flash, only to discover it is the journey missed that leaves so many souls empty and wanting every single day...be those souls the beggar with a rock of meth...or the successful entrepreneur who cannot pull away from acquiring more stuff in a blind effort to fill the void my father finally saw that fateful day on October.

That slow meandering road still exists and it beckons me. I follow its path every single day of my life...none-more so than those days on my bicycle, struggling to ride fast...yet always slower than the slowest car...pushing myself yet never missing any moment of life, soaking everything up like a sponge so that the pillow on my deathbed will be as soft as the memories of this road that root deep in my being.