An anxious morning

It started as an innocuous enough morning: cool steamtable eggs (and I don't mean that in the figurative sense), cold bacon, frost on the grass and the windscreen, confusing directions that would have put me on the wrong interstate if I'd paid enough attention to the front desk man to follow them... Black and white cattle on feedlots beside the highway, alternating with 16-foot-tall bales of hay wrapped in white and black plastic; a huge multidimensional Lone Star at the Texas state line (most other states in the union, I've observed, content themselves with a modest if colorful sign).

I actually found an NPR station on the edge of El Paso, and gratefully turned up the volume: NPR, even daft things like Click & Clack or the comic quiz show, is a boon to the long-distance driver with brains between their ears, providing relief from endless hours of country-rap-religious programming. Or static.

This morning's programming, however, coming as it did when I was surrounded by some of the coldest, rawest desert-to-mountain landscape I've ever seen, simply made me uneasy. First, an extended interview with one Dr. Pauline Chen, about her book, Final Exam: A Surgeon's Reflections on Mortality. Remember, I'm making this trip at top speed in order to reach South Carolina before my mother's decision-making medical appointment...

Next came clips from George Matthew's recent Verdi Requium for Darfur at Carnegie Hall, with the chilling Dies Irae among the portions played. This was followed by a program about using sound to heal mind and body, quite mystical and New Age hippie, and doubtless meant to be soothing, but the tones and chants the moderator played and the guests intoned were nonetheless a little disquieting. Particularly because the last time I'd rolled east between these mountain passes was during the Terri Schiavo uproar, during which drive the three comic morning radio show hosts (two men, one gal) had been bantering about when they'd pull the plug on their significant others -- very tasteful.

So I turned off the radio when static took over and the interstate split, turning instead to the iPod's broadcast capabilities (thank you Belkin). The playlist my fumbling fingers selected should have been a great tonic -- a playlist of a couple hundred songs from over my lifetime which I'd selected when I intended to hold a monster birthday party in February. Yes, but...

Can music one listened to a lot during an anxious time in one's life reignite that anxiety when heard ten or twenty years later? These were wonderful tunes, ones which lifted my spirit tremendously back whenever, songs that I knew every word of because I'd fallen asleep or ridden the Underground to them over and over again. But by the time I was ready to stop for a late lunch, I had a cold stomach, the old anxious pressure in the chest, and an incipient headache.

Hunger and the stress of navigating between 18-wheelers doing 80 mph for five hours? Maybe. Or was it body memories replaying as the songs unwound in my ears again, sometimes for the first time since the rough night on the ship, the weekend we moved, the nights I waited for the knock on the door...

I was sorely tempted to stop at a Texas highway rest stop signposed "Free Wi-Fi" and download something altogether pop and simple-minded, but pressed on regardless, past signs beckoning me to "Comfort, an Antique Towne" and a place called Welfare.