The Highway Is for Gamblers

One of my enduring memories from attending the Browning School for Boys has nothing to do with anything that went on inside the walls of any of the classrooms at 52 East 62nd Street (thank goodness for therapy) but, rather, with a Friday afternoon activity of which I never tired. 

We (usually George, Dave, Arthur, and (occasionally) Roy) would skip hobbies and make a beeline for the ESSO Building at 75 Rockefeller Center. It's not like we were gearheads or anything like it but, we'd stop at the main desk and take turns telling stories to the guy (I don't ever remember a woman) behind the counter whose job was to help plan road trips. 

Oh. Those were in the days when glove compartments were crammed with road maps, and every brand of gasoline had roadmaps on racks inside where you'd stop in after you'd paid the attendant who'd fueled your car. 

The maps were free (our mom used to use them to make book covers every September when the school year started) and you could take as many as you want (within reason). We always thought of them as some of the most real things there were in the world but that, as it turned out wasn't always true proving that Ruth is indeed stranger than Bridget.   

Anyway, back inside at the ESSO building. We'd say to the planner that we wanted to go to Alamogordo, New Mexico (we would never say that at the time; that just came to me now), and the planner would grab a bunch of different maps and highlighters, and spread the maps out across the surface of his desk and begin to trace the route(s), plural because he'd ask you if you wanted to go the fastest way or the most scenic and sometimes we'd say one or the other and sometimes we'd say both. He never doubted our sincerity and we always assumed he was accurate and honest.

Each adventure might last fifteen or more minutes complete with asides like, 'there's construction near Indianapolis so you'll have to take a blue highway instead of the interstate' or words to that effect. It was a pause that refreshed and I've thought about those Fridays often in the course of the last half-century plus, maybe more than my fair share to compensate for all the times that Ray never got to think about them after getting dying in Vietnam shortly after arriving there in the autumn of 1970. 

Now, I get comfortable behind the wheel and talk to my phone, and Google walks me through the drive turn by turn. No magic, no mystery. No struggles to refold the map just the way you found it.  Nothing to remember and even less to forget. 
-bill kenny