“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

— Robert Louis Stevenson

  When I was about nine, my Dad started taking me on road trips. At first, it was a part of the every-other-weekend travel variety since he and my mother separated when I was eight. The “trips” were ones that he had to take for his own work, based primarily in West Springfield, Massachusetts, a three and a half hour ride from where I grew up. My Dad thought nothing of driving back and forth to get me in one day. He loved to drive, he took pride in his safety and knowledge of the open road. And he made a pretty pleasant travel companion.

I, too, loved (and still love) to be in motion. I packed in all the Sweet Valley Twins and Fear Street books I could and would read, read, read as my Dad sped along the highway. When he stopped to get gas, I asked for a Veryfine apple juice and Hostess banana walnut mini muffins. When we ate at IHOP, I liked the steak sandwich with no cheese. He knew all the watiresses names where he ate almost every day and got a special rate at the Super Eight Motel for when he lived there during the week. He was, without a doubt, the traveling kind. If the great affair was to move, my Dad was definitely having an affair.

My Dad would chastise me for having my nose in a book and not talking to him and would perk me up with pretending to be swerving to avoid an animal or person in the road that wasn’t there. We would listen to the single of Whitney Houston singing the Star Spangled Banner (one of his favorites), Randy Travis or the Judds. Our road trips included: New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Washington DC and I am sure many more. When I close my eyes at night, I can still hear him making business calls in the van (on one of the first “car phones” there ever was!) or ordering a fresh cup of coffee at a diner. When I think about all that time I had with him on those trips, I count myself truly blessed. My Dad made me a traveler, helped me look at the world with a purity and grace that I treasure. Gave me that same giddy-ness to get-on-the-road-and-get-going. My traveling bug came from him.

My Dad has been with me since the moment I became an RV owner. I heard his cheers of approval, his bursting chest with pride and even caught his eyeroll over it having a Chevy engine as opposed to a Ford. I even felt his reassurance when we found ourselves on the side of the road in our first mini breakdown. I started carrying an old Polaroid of us in my wallet. My fingers have brushed it more often lately, with all of the wallet toting that travel brings. Two days ago, in a traffic jam in Yosemite National Park, the song “You Are My Sunshine” came on the radio. It took my children a couple minutes to name that tune they knew was a song I sang in my own childhood (who has ever heard that song on the radio before?), but by the time they did, my eyes were filled with tears.

I lost my Dad in 2009 and don’t think I have ever missed him as much as the past two and a half weeks. There have been so many moments, so many blinks of my eyes where I have felt him on the road with us. But, one place I did not expect to find it was in the novel Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee. I won’t bore you with my excitement over the release of this novel as an English Teacher and blah blah blah, but I will tell you, it’s basic premise is a grown woman confronting her father on something terrible she thinks he has become. It’s a coming of age novel for twenty-somethings. Like St. Elmo’s Fire as compared to the Breakfast Club. It’s poignant, it’s sweet and the adult relationship between Scout and Atticus reminds me so, so, so much of my Dad and myself.

When I was in my early twenties, I thought I had it figured out. I wrote a letter to my father outlining his transgressions and how I thought he had failed me. I looked at this action as a mature and adult-like putting my foot down. Now I see it was self-involved, petty and a bit over the top. That letter cost me from age 22-29 with my father. The last seven years of his life, we were for all intents and purposes– estranged. We saw each other only a handful of times in those seven years. By the time he died, I was a wife and a soon to be mother. I have never regretted anything more.

But sometimes when you travel, you find experiences, emotions and even some pretty spiritual moments that bring you— for lack of a better word: home. Tonight, I read Go Set a Watchman aloud in the RV (per Parker’s request) as the kids fell asleep. Even after I knew they were sleeping, I kept reading aloud as I knew I would soon finish the book and, ever a sucker for the dramatic reading, I liked how it heightened my experience with the text.

And when I reached this line, I buckled. Harper Lee’s language and ability to just yank with force on a reader’s heartstrings is what makes her a literary marvel.

“…now you, Miss, born with your own conscience, somewhere along the line fastened it like a barnacle onto your father’s. As you grew up, when you were grown, totally unknown to yourself, you confused your father with God. You never saw him as a man with a man’s heart and a man’s failings– I’ll grant you it may have been hard to see, he makes few mistakes but he makes ’em like all of us” (265).

And on this trip of discovery, adventure and personal growth, I read that passage as a glaring message of forgiveness from my Dad. As he watches me hop from state to state with my family.

Sorry, this was a sappy one, but I had to write it.