On the Road

http://polaroid41.com/on-the-road/

Saturday October 3rd, 2020 - 3:53pm.

After talking about and dreaming up “Polaroid 41” for almost a year, Marc (my friend and co-creator of the project) and I launched our website and podcast at the end of August. We’re both actors, so making something that only exists in the digital world is new for us and we started talking about how we’d like Polaroid 41 to exist in the ‘real world’ in some way. ‘Un bel objet,’ something beautiful that you could hold or pass along.

“Like a business card?” I’m not totally sure.

“Maybe something like this…” Marc says and pulls something from his wallet. It’s a small square with rounded edges, a black and white image of a road, it’s thicker than a business card and nice to touch. I turn it over and see that the back has a little drawing of a single-lens reflex camera and the contact information of a photographer. It’s beautiful.

As I am looking at it, Marc continues, “She’s got a bunch. They’re all different. When she gave it to me she showed me a dozen different ones and let me choose. I picked this one.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I like to drive. I’ve always loved it and can’t quite explain why. It’s not about running away or escaping something. I just love being on the road.”

With that, I got to thinking about being on the road. I have a fairly conflicted relationship with cars. I find driving stressful and mostly feel like the fact that we all just go zooming around in these little polluting, metal death boxes is pretty insane. I feel like people don’t take driving nearly seriously enough.

I used to joke sometimes that the reason I was living in Paris was because I was too anti-car to live in America. For the 11 years I lived in Paris I never had a car and didn’t miss it once.

Now that we live in the smaller city of Toulouse and the beach and the mountains aren’t too far away, I’ve finally gotten around to getting my French driver's license and at age 37, I bought my first car.

I still don’t drive often, (our car can easily sit in the garage for a month or two) and I still find driving stressful. However, I’ll admit that the three of us being able to load up the car with beach gear and kites and coolers and head to the coast is pretty great.

I’ll also admit that while I don’t really like driving, there is something I love about being ‘on the road.’

In the car there aren’t any interruptions. You’re going from point A to point B and there isn’t anything else you need to be doing. Your options are limited: you can look out the window, you can sit with your thoughts, you can listen to music and you can talk to the people in the car with you. There can be something magical about those conversations in the car. You’ve got time and you’re side by side, rather than face to face. Maybe this makes it easier to dive into deeper conversations.

After my parents divorced when I was 12, my sisters and I moved with my mom from our home in the Twin Cities to Lake Crystal, a small town in south-central Minnesota, about 90 miles from where my dad lived.

This wasn’t easy but my parents did an excellent job of keeping us all connected despite the distance. Almost every single Saturday morning we’d leave to go up to my dad’s house for the weekend and we’d come back very early before school on Monday morning. I’d pile into the car with my two younger sisters and my parents would each drive us half way. We’d meet in the middle at a parking lot of a restaurant and apple orchard.

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Polaroid and full text available at: http://polaroid41.com/on-the-road/