Back then, I played third base for Ditmars Bakery. I wasn't any good at baseball--neither at hitting nor fielding nor throwing--but what I did do well, and I hope that counted for something, was block the ball.
If a scorcher came down the third base line, I'd throw my body and keep the ball in front of me. This was good training for the years I would play goalkeeper on a soccer pitch, where, essentially, the only skill you need, is to throw your body in front of the ball.
I wasn't the greatest keeper on the planet, but you could do worse than send me between the posts.
By the time I was old enough to understand Star Trek, I didn't want to be a baseball player when I grew up. By then, I knew that wasn't in the cards for me. Not in baseball. Not in soccer.
You could tell the other kids were faster and more skilled.
They cared more, too, about the game. They didn't just accept that they might be good enough to be ballplayers--in the daily, narcissistic delusions we indulge in to get through our days, they thought of themselves as ballplayers.
Meanwhile, what I really wanted to be, what I walked around the halls of PS 85 thinking of myself as, was Commander of the Star Trek Enterprise.
That, at least, was realistic.
And so, the current commander of the Star Trek Enterprise, William Riker, was more or less my role model.
Riker was brave and confident and tall and good-looking and courageous and most importantly, he was trusted by the captain, by Jean-Luc Picard, the Frenchman with the British accent.
Picard called Riker "Number One" and he sent Riker on the away team missions, and whenever Picard had to disappear to host a diplomatic envoy, Riker would be left in charge of the ship.
"The bridge is yours, Number One," Picard would say, and Riker would get gassed up with a big cheese ball grin and take the captain's chair.
After spending time learning from the best, it was assumed that Riker would take over the Enterprise and be the best.
He was considered the up-and-coming star in Starfleet command. He was respected by his peers and adored by his subordinates. He could lead. He cared about others. He believed in service and discipline.
He afforded his officers leeway and encouraged their independent thought.
By all measures, Riker was the man. And by all the measures I could count, I wanted to be Riker.
But sometime early, in my elementary school years, in an episode titled, "All Good Things," the show ended.
I could no longer watch an episode of Star Trek and think, in my end, before the captain would act, what I would do as captain. I could no longer pretend I was Riker, and think, in my head, what Riker would do, before he would do it.
The end of the show took that away from me. From then on out, I knew the turns and twists, the gambits and losses, and it was all just a review.
It had all come to an end.
SO IT IS WITH THIS ROAD TRIP. I am now back in Queens, NY, after having traveled to Stroutsburg and Buffalo and Ann Arbor and Mackinac and Minneapolis and West Branch and St. Louis and Columbia and Independence and Rapid City and Cody and Yellowstone and Jackson and Bozeman and Calgary and Edmonton and Dawson's Creek and Whitehorse and Tok and Fairbanks and Anchorage and Juneau and Minnedosa and Winnipeg and the mother fucking George Washington Bridge.
It was a good trip.
And now that I'm sort of on the spot to produce a more substantive statement than "it was a good trip", I'm sort of at a loss. Am I supposed to say it was amazing or super or unbelievable?
Am I supposed to say that I got something out of it that's changed my life forever?
I don't know.
But I'll share something I wrote this on a rest area, on I-80, most of the way back home. I hope it has that sort of sweeping arc one expects out of cross-country road trips.
It's not exactly Melville about to send Ishmael on the Pequod, but I hope it'll do. I wrote this in a Hyundai after all. It came to me in Pennsylvania.
That's the moral of road trips. You keep moving all you want. The world isn't going anywhere.
So, ahem...
It is important to be great. We must all be great. Have the courage to aspire to greatness and surround ourselves with those who share this ambition. We are, none of us, in competition with the Joneses of the world. Not of the Smiths.
We are in competition with the Lincolns, the Gandhis, the Darwins, the Salks, and the Bartons. Some of these men and women achieved greatness by tackling the obvious injustices of their era. Others through ingenuity and innovation.
If the struggles of our era are not obvious, we must find them.
All achieved greatness through service.
As I return to New York, my journey has not ended. It has begun with an awesome new vigor.
I encourage all to a commitment to greatness. I have committed to greatness. The day I return to New York will be the anniversary of this day and every year this day will mark our progress.
Service is not rendered and greatness is not achieved without sacrifice. We must establish greatness as our first priority and be willing to decide and lead with this priority to guide.
Thank you.
I literally wrote "Thank you" in my notebook and spoke in the first-person plural as if I was Bill Pullman in Independence Day giving a speech to the last air wing of the human resistance: "We will not go quietly into the night, we will not go down without a fight...today will be our Independence Day."
But I stand by it.
October 3rd. That is the day that, from this point forward, I will measure my life. Not some random fluke like my birthday, just counting the years since I was born, and estimating when I will die. But a Ground Zero for the balance of my story.
Wherein the narrator has his moment of epiphany, followed by an epilogue, which previews a sequel.
Hopefully I'll stick to this ambition. It is my intention to stick to this ambition--read more books, drink less scotch, put the nose to the grindstone--and hope to see results. We'll check back in a year.
The idea is, if I work hard enough, maybe, just maybe, one day I'll even get to ride shotgun on the Enterprise.
BOX SCORE
Total time: 54 days
Total mileage: 13,000 (Oil changes: Elmurst, NY; Springfield, IL; Bozeman, MT; Fairbanks, AK; Edmonton, AB)
Miles per day: 240.75
Nights slept in WalMart: 6
Nights slept in a rest stop in Minnedosa, Manitoba: 1
Nights slept in weather so cold it produced frost on tent: 3
Furthest west I saw a bear: On the wilderness tour of Denali National Park.
Furthest east I saw a bear: On the mile 224 marker on I-80 in Pennsylvania.
Most amazing: Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota
Least amazing: Customs official's ass crack hanging out my driver's compartment
Number of bugs killed on windshield: 1983745621390874921308471239084079. As the saying goes, "Kill one bug and you're a murderer, kill a thousand, and you should change your oil at places that offer free car washes."
Speeding tickets: 1 (Anchorage, AK), 78 in a 65. Kind of schmaltzy if you ask me. Lucky they didn't catch me going 110 through the sandhills of Nebraska. Would've been hard to explain that one. "But officer, I didn't know people lived around here."
Number of people who rode in car besides me: Pascal, Queens to Rochester; Pannda, Rapid City to Jackson; Cavester, Calgary to Anchorage; Staplez, Anchorage to Edmonton; God, Queens to Queens.
Backyards of former vice-presidential candidates visited: 1 (Palin's lake in Wasilla, AK)
Best meal: Alaskan snow crab at that place in Juneau. You know the one.
Worst meal: French fries from Burger King in Toledo, OH. They were cooked in rat poison, I'm sure of it.
Favorite vocabulary word of the trip: hirsute (n.), meaning hairy. As in Z came back from Alaska fairly hirsute. The word can, for fun, be pronounced like "hair suit." Like, Z came back from Alaska in a hirsute.
Driving time-waster, 1st place: Pannda reading aloud the Presidential Flash Cards I bought in Truman's library. Who knew Woodrow Wilson used to be President of Princeton before he was Governor of New Jersey?
Driving time-waster, 2nd place: Trivial Pursuit. There is an inordinate amount of trivia about Africa, Arabs, and Egyptian history in this game, which comes in kind of handy if you're, like, an Egyptian-American.
Driving time-waster, honorable mention: Country music. "God is great, beer is good, people are crazy." You can't make up lyrics like that. Well, actually, you could. If you were guy making up those lyrics...
SO THAT'S ALL FOR THE ROAD TRIP, but what about being back to Queens? On the way across America, whenever someone would notice my New York license plate, they would instinctively ask: "You're not really from New York, are you?"
"Yup, Queens."
My sister, who is also from Queens, would find it surprising that I would say "Queens" and not "New York City" as she does, Queens, technically being, the largest component of said metropolis.
"I don't want people thinking I'm some pansy from Manhattan."
"But it's OK that you're a pansy?"
"As long as they don't think I'm a pansy from Manhattan."
She was skeptical as to whether or not people from across America, and many parts of Canada would know where Queens is. They do. They all do. I've never had one person ask, "Where is that?"
It's the home of two of the three airports you would use to fly into New York. We've got the Mets in Flushing. We also have a grand slam tennis tournament. There's been a major sitcom based in Queens for two generations: "All in the Family" and then "King of Queens."
Not to mention that George Costanza lives in Queens. He actually "lives" in the block down from my grandma.
The great Carol O'Connor was even from Queens himself. So is John McEnroe, Rodney Dangerfield, Tony Bennet, and Christopher Walken. To name a few. Oh, yeah, Simon & Garfunkel.
They filmed King Kong in Queens.
Who doesn't know Queens?
But to be away from Queens from so long, and then to suddenly return, incurs a bit of a culture shock. You never quite get used to the death trap of Queens Boulevard. Not to the tangling subway lines at Roosevelt Ave, and especially not to the Queens attitude problem.
And if you're away for awhile, your resistance to said attitude problem can atrophy.
It even did with me.
Went down to the Kew Gardens County Clerk's office my second day back. Wanted to register for a rifle license so I could legally buy a gun and learn to hunt. (Alaska puts these things in a man's mind.)
Parked my car, bought a cold bottle of water from a Korean grocer, and headed down to the basement of the clerk's office. Around the corner from their post office, through rusty, paint-pealing doors, behind a counter stood a woman all of five-feet tall with curly blond hair.
She was not happy to be working in the basement of the clerk's office on Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens.
"What do you want?" she asked me, a proud public servant, serving the needs of no one in particular.
I told her I would like to apply for a rifle license.
She handed me the application. "Here!" she literally screamed at me, "Go!"
"Somewhere else?"
"Read the instructions."
She didn't give me much time to follow her own advice. "Um, can I get another one for my friend?"
She snatched the application back from my hand. "You got a computer a home?"
"Yes."
She wrote down a URL for me to download another application. "Then use it."
Ah. Welcome back to Queens, fucker. Your hairy ass wasn't missed. Not even for a second.
Wherein the narrator returns from his trip in a hair suit.
Wherein the narrator is arrested for stealing cereal from the Pannda's lair.
