Rambling On

From the East Coast to the West

Got no time to for spreadin roots,

The time has come to be gone.

And tho our health we drank a thousand times,

It's time to ramble on.

7.57 pm

There's about an hour until dusk and I gaze rather lamely out the window I've cracked open, catching a whiff of sweet grass and a glimpse of a long line of trucks carrying cargo from some place or another to some place or another without wondering where those places are.  Rather, I wonder vaguely how the pioneers-with-capital-P (why didn't I just write Pioneers?) felt heading West.  But I'm mostly thinking about the heading, and the Westerliness.  It's a strange feeling, this wrenching of roots, and it's only sinking into me now, when I'm doing it for the second time, and even then nearly two weeks after I left New Haven.  Perhaps it's because I've only been moving down (to Virginia and D.C.) and then up (to Manhattan and Brooklyn) the East Coast this past week or so that I haven't been able to settle in to this blaring, glaring fact.  

It's been comforting to view it with incredulity.  I'm leaving the East.  I'm heading West.  I'm leaving sunrises and heading towards sunsets and it feels like such a dramatic ending, a switch from possibility to resignation.  I'm leaving a place that has become the setting of the myth of my own creation, so seminal.  Leaving such a place leaves me with a heaving sense of finality.  I'm gone.  Period.

Period.

Period.

Period.

But then, three periods form an ellipses, ultimate connotation of endless possibilities, of stories to be continued...