Life and Art

CD liked my recurring daydream (see post below) of packing everything I own (which is nothing) into a motorhome and hitting the road.

In Deemer's novel Sodom, Gomorrah & Jones his protagonist, the retired history professor CJ, opts for a life on the road.  In this final chapter CJ narrowly avoids a collision with a semi somewhere in Mississippi.


Life and Death

CJ TOOK THE southern route to Florida, trying to drive 300
miles a day before his back started bothering him, often
making it. He planned to meet his new friends from Boston at
a campground in Cape Coral. They could spend the rest of the
winter there staying warm, said the Smarts, which suited CJ
just fine.

He was driving across Mississippi, listening to The
Canterbury Tales on earphones. “The Miller's Tale” had him
in stitches, laughing aloud as he drove down a country road
with fields on each side, the traffic light.

By the time he reached the part where an unwanted
suitor stands outside a maiden's window, begging for a kiss,
and she mischievously sticks her bare butt out the window:

Dark was the night as pitch, aye dark as coal,
And through the window she put out her hole.
And Absalom no better felt nor worse,
But with his mouth he kissed her naked arse.

CJ was laughing so hard, his eyes welling, that he didn't notice
the stop sign at a crossroads ahead, which seemed to come
from nowhere in the country landscape; and if a dog had not
darted out of a field in chase of a critter, getting CJ's attention
as the animal crossed the road in front of him, with the result
that CJ's reflexive breaking slowed his approach just enough
for the van to skid through the intersection a hair behind a
semi, barely missing it as the truck roared legally by at high
speed, left to right: the semi surely would have creamed him
had CJ not braked.

He pulled to the shoulder of the road, stopped and pulled
out the earplugs; and he felt his heart racing and his body
shaking; and he understood correctly that he had missed
death by a whisker.

Later in the day CJ was in a coffee shop, writing in his
blog for the first time. He had changed its title to “An Old
Fogey On The Road.”


Earlier today, he began, driving solo across the country,
I got to laughing so hard that I almost killed myself. Let me
explain.

END


TS