traveling...

(a little late--busy and trouble figuring out how to find my blog to write on--I found the blog over and again, just not to write on...but John found it for me...)

Friday and Saturday, we traveled--Bern and John and Sherry and I--all the way from CT to NC, stopping for the night in VA.

I've know John since 1971--he was a graduate student, working on his Ph.D. is psychology and I was a Social Service worker for the WV Dept of Welfare and Bern and I lived in Morgantown. John and I both went to St. Gabrial's mission, which met in the attic of our apartment. Bern was finishing her BFA at WVU after a year at Northeastern while I was at Harvard.

I've known Sherry since 1980, when I was Rector of St. Paul's in New Haven and she was a member there. She anGd Bern have been a member of 'Group' a women's group never larger than 6, for over 30 years. Sherry and her husband, Jack, are two of our best friends. In fact, John and Sherry and Jack are three people who are among both my and Bern's 'best friends'.

Driving for many hours on Interstate Highways are, in my opinion, one of the ways to bond deeply and to discuss things you wouldn't bring up without moving at high speed, just me talkin'.

I noticed that when Mejol and I went to West Virginia from Baltimore and back. We talked about things we would have never discussed about our lives and our childhood that we wouldn't have gotten to in several days sitting opposite each other.

Part of it, I think, is that you can't really make consistent eye-contact at 80 mph. It frees us up, in my thought, to go deeper than we would faster than we could have, or would have been willing to, looking at each other all the time.

Don't worry, I'm not going to go into those conversations. They are two personal. But they were theaputic and healing in many ways.

So, get into a car and drive fast with people you love for hours and hours. You might just find yourselves at a place you needed to get but haven't been able to....