about time, yes it is

Last week I packed up and rode with my parents northward into Washington, wishing I could visit the people I’ve met online who live that direction, but focused on seeing my brothers, my sister-in-law, and a few old haunts.

Mom and Dad had just returned from a three-week trip with my aunt and uncle, down the California coast and back up through Vegas and Tahoe (sophisticated travelers they). They’d had a lovely time, but while they were gone, my sis-in-law’s father died. Lynn didn’t want them to miss a minute of the vacation they’d planned for months, and so she urged them not to come back for her dad’s funeral. At home I twisted my fingers, wandered the house, checked Amtrak fares, and tried to imagine visiting Lynn and my brother Dan and all of Lynn’s family who were trying to get things accomplished the week after her dad passed away. I decided I’d be less of a bother coming to see them at the later date with the parents, so I did.

It became a journey of connections with several relatives and old friends and also with places. In Tacoma, the city where I learned to drive and watched eight showings of the original Star Wars and marched in the daffodil parade and got married, things are quite different. Though I recognize intersections and landmarks, I’d get lost if I were trying to navigate between them. Mount Tahoma high school has moved to a new building, all large and sophisticated and dwarfing its familiar totem pole. The church Dad last preached at on Roosevelt Heights is gone, replaced by four townhouses. A gravel pit near where they lived in University Place has become a world-class golf course.

Most things change. But then there’s Puget Sound, my old friend.
We drove around Point Defiance, a park where, the summer after eighth grade, we took Tim’s family to see the sights. He was eighteen then, and I was fourteen, and he was engaged to a girl back home in Illinois. (Their marriage never came about; how could it, after he’d spent time with me and Pacific Northwest scenery?)

On Friday we drove across the Narrows Bridge, viewing the new, additional bridge beside it.
Then we rode back on a ferry.
And we came to Dan and Lynn’s, and feasted and visited and talked about changes and things that stay the same.