Think back on your most memorable road trip.
The title of this blog post comes from a line I heard years ago. I talked about the whole event on my podcast, Audio Chimera, in an episode with the same title, so I won’t repeat it here. I exhort you to go listen to it for the full story.
The line’s origin came from a young woman I thought I was in a relationship with. I met her through a friend who was the girlfriend of my high school buddy Jim. His fiancee had to move back to Fort Wayne, IN after her father died, but Jim—who got engaged to her very quickly—was not going to relinquish their relationship. He decided it would be fun to visit her at Thanksgiving. And since I had taken such a liking to her friend Nancy, would I like to go along? Of course!
I had thought she felt the same about me after we met and exchanged letters (yes, the handwritten kind), but she was very cool to me during the visit. In a letter to me after my letter (written subsequent to our arriving home in front of a massive blizzard that we stayed ahead of) and asking her what happened, she told me that her plans for the future included medical school and that she didn’t want to get tied down in a relationship like her mother had, becoming some man’s chief cook, bottle washer, and baby machine.
Clearly she didn’t know me at all. That would not have been my intent, to derail her career plans. (A google search seems to suggest she became a pediatrician.) Besides, we were just in the early stages of a long-distance relationship, so any long-term involvement and subsequent derailment seemed unlikely anyway. But that would not have been my plan in any case; I would have supported her completely. But it was not to be
I used the line frequently in my Intro to Theatre class, talking about the likelihood that young women of the Medieval period disguised themselves as men and joined the clergy (see the story of Pope Joan) as a way of getting out of being the downtrodden female enacting the roles of chief cook, bottle washer, and baby machine. I never could tell if the students reacted in any way to this line, but I always had to smile with the thought of “Ah, Nancy” and what might have been.
MUSOFYR 