The pictures on this page are from a trip my big sister and I were taken on in 1962. We rode across the USA in a Ford Falcon station wagon with faux wood side panels, starting in Los Angeles and ending there as well. I found them in a slide carousel in my parents’ garage after their deaths.

After that car trip, ten years passed. In 1972, I dropped out of college, worked for a summer, and then made the same trip, this time as the driver, in a different Ford. I left that car in a field in Maryland and took an Air Icelandic flight that stopped in Reykjavik on its way to Paris, where I stayed three months, trying to become a writer.

Another ten years passed, then another, and another, and another.

Life goes by. Married, two children, widowed, remarried, divorced, earning a living, home and auto and health insurance.

All of it, from birth to the place I’m heading, are just details.