So here goes my first post. This is weird; writing about something completely random that no one on the face of this green Earth could possibly want to read, let alone care about. Writing is sort of an unreasonable word choice... Okay, more than unreasonable. There is nothing even close to the concept writing when it comes to being in front of a computer screen. (My mother would be so proud of that statement.) TYPING these thoughts, on the other hand, is at least as weird. Well here we go. As soon as I started brainstorming what to write, this story immediately came to mind...
Two weeks ago I was in the car with my lovely family. (Well, not my entire lovely family, 3/4 of it rather. My mom stayed home... Probably for the better.) We were on our way home from the lovely town of Howell Michigan where we had spent the last three days visiting family for a short after-Christmas vacation. And by short I mean hardly worth the fourteen hour car trip there and the fourteen hour car trip back, with maybe a total of 60 hours spent in the actual state of Michigan. (Not to mention the multiple sickly episodes that I was ensuing at least every ten minutes.) To say the least, the trip didn't seem worth it in the beginning, however all three of us were pleasantly surprised with the outcome. Between the making fun of mom and the sisterly duet singing of The Beatles we made it through 28 hours in the car.
On our way home, in some town between Ohio and West Virginia, I look up and see a typical, over-highway bridge. Not very exciting, obviously, and probably the seven hundredth bridge I'd seen since we departed three days earlier, but there was something special about this particular bridge... Going about 70 miles per hour, having passed many bridges before this one, and being somewhat loopy due to the lack of the ability to walk on land, you would think something like this would slip past me, however, not today. Written across the edge of the bridge were three words, hand-written, like someone had put them there just for me. As I looked up and saw the words "I love you" scrawled on the side of the bridge, I quickly got excited, (as I do for many unimportant yet irregular events) and proclaimed to the rest of the passengers what I had seen. Amidst my various "aww"s and sounds of excitement, my dad went on to say that he was glad I saw what he had written up there because we would have been screwed if I had missed it.
He told me he had woken up early that morning, drove all the way to that bridge, scaled the side of the bridge, shimmied out to the middle, and wrote the three words up there, just for me to see on our trip home. It made me laugh. A lot. But it was sweet. That pretty much sums up our father-daughter trip "back home" to Michigan.
