You Don’t Have As Much Time As You Think
By: Christopher Robin
Tags: Time, Memories, Travel, Love, Relationships

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

When you’re young, you think that there will always be more time to do those things you love. You never know when it will be the last time for something. The problem is you only realize this through the foggy lens of time.

More than twenty years ago, my dad and I set out on a cross-country drive together. I moved from Norfolk, Virginia, to El Paso, Texas, to my permanent duty station at Ft. Bliss.

I was nineteen years old and, like most nineteen-year-olds, thought I was an adult. I had just graduated from the Armed Forces School of Music and was on top of the world. My folks came down to pick me up and bring my meager belongings home to spend a few days before heading off to the great southwest.

The time home was lovely, catching up with a few friends before saying goodbye, to some I would never see again. My grandmother was very sick, and the prognosis was not good — a strange and anxious time.

In February 1999, we left Mom and family behind and headed down the road. We planned to make it to a place called Knobnoster, Missouri, to Mom’s brother’s to stay for the night. On the second day, we would continue west, where we had a reservation at a hotel in Tucumcari, New Mexico.

Neither my dad nor I had been that far southwest before. We were excited to see what the southwest desert looked like. It turns out it looks a lot like the Wile E. Coyote cartoons. And being avid fans of Warner Bros. and Bugs Bunny for all of our lives (Dad, of course, passing his legacy of slapstick cartoon comedy onto me), we knew that this was a chance, maybe our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to right a wrong. To make up for all those mistakes Bugs made when he got lost so many times.

See, whenever Bugs got lost, he would always pull out a map to study and discover where he went wrong. And for some reason, it always led him back to one mistake: “I knew I shoulda made that left turn at ‘Albakoiky.’”

We set out the next morning, heading west towards Albuquerque, NM. We could have turned south and had a desolate drive straight towards the western tip of Texas. However, it made more sense to go out of our way to honor our hero. So instead, we headed straight west to go to Albuquerque to make a left. And we did. Here’s a lovely picture of it. The only one that exists:

Photo by Author

We arrived in El Paso several hours later and found our hotel. We had a couple days together before he would get on his plane back to Pittsburgh. In those couple of days, we drank beer, played golf, watched TV, and got lost.

Unfortunately, my brakes went to shit on my car, I lost my debit card at the golf course, and I hadn’t found my barracks because it was a holiday weekend on the base. My old man gave me all the cash he had, hugged me goodbye, and got on his plane, leaving me in shambles and basically lost, broke, and homeless.

Life is funny, though. While Dad was on that plane worrying about me, I drove back to Ft. Bliss, hoping to find…I don’t know what. By pure happenstance, I drove down a lonely old corner of the base up to an old building. I immediately recognized a friend from Norfolk, my new roommate at Ft. Bliss. He was outside getting in his car to go away for the long weekend. We shook hands, and he let me in my room. I went and got my car fixed and called Mom to tell her not to worry. Dad was probably still on the tarmac.

In subsequent years and with the advancement of technology, I was able to track this route and discover that we only added hundred-twenty miles to our trip. In the grand scheme of things, I wish we would have had another thousand.

I loved that trip as much as any trip I’ve ever taken. I am as old now as Dad was then, and it doesn’t seem possible. Dad is still a young sixty-something, but his days of traveling cross-country to deliver his only son to the army are over. I always thought that he and I would take more trips like that in the future. However, life has other ideas.