Michael Zadoorian

I haven__ been out driving at this time of night in many years, much less in an unfamiliar area. These are the things that scare you as you get older. You understand night all too well, all its attendant meanings. You try to avoid it, work around it, keep it from entering your house. Your weary, ornery body tells you to stay up late, sleep less, keep the lights on, don__ go into the bedroom__f you have to sleep, sleep in your chair, at the table. Everything is about avoiding the night. Because of that, I suppose that I should be scared out here in the dark, but I am finally past that, I think.(p.204)

I think about what the man at the Coney joint said. He was right. We are the people who stay. We stay in our homes and pay them off. We stay at our jobs. We do our thirty and come home to stay even more. We stay until we are no longer able to mow our lawns and our gutters sag with saplings, until our houses look haunted to the neighborhood children. We like it where we are. I guess then the other question is: Why do we even travel? There can only be one answer to that: we travel to appreciate home. (p.97)

The last slide is Main Street at night, with the castle lit silver blue in the background. In the sky, fireworks are going off, cresting, cracking open the darkness, shooting long tendrils of colored light down to the buildings, way longer than I__e ever seen for fireworks_ I linger on this slide. I study that blue castle and those fireworks and realize that this is the image I__e had in my head of Disneyland for all these years. Just like the beginning of the Wonderful World of Disney TV show. Maybe that__ why I wanted to head here this time. I know it__ ridiculous, but part of me wants to think that the world after this one could look like that.Like I said before, I stopped having notions about religion and heaven long ago__ngels and harps and clouds and all that malarkey. Yet some silly, childish side of me still wants to believe in something like this. A gleaming world of energy and light, where nothing is quite the same color as it is on earth__verything bluer, greener, redder. Or maybe we just become the colors, that light spilling from the sky over the castle. Perhaps it would be somewhere we__e already been, the place we were before we were born, so dying is simply a return. I guess is that were true then somehow we__ remember it. Maybe that__ what I__ doing with this whole trip__ooking for somewhere that I remember, deep in some crevice of my soul. Who knows? Maybe Disneyland is heaven. Isn__ that the damnedest, craziest thing you__e ever heard? Must be the dope talking.(pp.253-254)

_this is the problem with photographs. After a while, you can__ remember if you__e recalling the actual memory or the memory of the photograph. Or perhaps the photograph is the only reason you remember that moment. (p.85)

Hi lover," he says to me, completely forgetting what happened before.He knows who I am. He knows that I am the one person who he loves, has always loved. No disease, no person can take that away.(p.205)

It doesn__ upset me to think about dying. What upsets me is the idea of John being alone after his spell passes. The idea of one of us without the other. (p.127)

The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way. It makes you wonder if something inside us knows that our lives are going to pass faster than we could ever realize. So we run around like chickens about to lose our heads. Which makes our little two- or three-week vacations with our families more important than ever... As for the time that elapsed between those vacations, that__ another thing altogether. It seems to have all passed breathlessly, like some extended whisper of days, months, years, decades. (pp.39-40)

I am constantly mystified by what John ends up remembering_ I just don__ understand why he__ able to hang on to information like that, while so many other more important memories evaporate. Then again, I suppose so much of what stays with us is often insignificant. The memories we take to the ends of our lives have no real rhyme or reason, especially when you think of the endless things that you do over the course of a day, a week, a month, a year, a lifetime. All the cups of coffee, hand-washings, changes of clothes, lunches, goings to the bathroom, headaches, naps, walks to school, trips to the grocery store, conversations about the weather__ll the things so unimportant they should be immediately forgotten. Yet they aren__. I often think of the Chinese red bathrobe I had when I was twenty-seven years old; the sound of our first cat Charlie__ feet on the linoleum of our old house; the hot rarefied air around aluminum pot the moment before the kernels of popcorn burst open. I think of these things as often as I think about getting married or giving birth or the end of the Second World War. What is truly amazing is that before you know it, sixty years go by and you can remember maybe eight or nine important events, along with a thousand meaningless ones. How can that be?You want to think there__ a pattern to it all because it makes you feel better, gives you some sense of a reason why we__e here, but there really isn__ any. People look for God in these patterns, these reasons, but only because they don__ know where else to look.Things happen to us: some of it important, most of it not, and a little of it stays with us till the end. What stays after that? I__l be damned if I know.(pp.174-175)

I thought that nothing enormously bad or good had happened to me during my life. All the normal things had occurred. I had lived a completely unremarkable life. I wanted only my home, and the love and safety of those around me, nothing else. I knew there was no particular reason why I was put on this earth, but here I was and I was glad to be here, awed by the beauty of it. It was a perfect moment. (p.99)

This is exactly the sort of thing that makes traveling wonderful for me, the reason I defied everyone. The two of us together like we have always been, not saying anything, not doing anything special, just on vacation. I know nothing lasts, but even when you know that things are just about over, sometimes you can run back and take a little bit more and no one will notice.

After a while, just staying alive becomes a full-time job. No wonder we need a vacation.

Know this: even if you__e like us and still doddering around above ground, someone out there from your past is probably pretty sure that you__e dead by now. (p.125 )

Just then, a little hopped-up Japanese car zips up next to us. It__ bright yellow with loud, high-pitched exhaust pipes and a big air spoiler on the back. I look over at the driver to see who__ making all the racket. I__ surprised to see a teenage girl there. After a moment, she gooses it and whinnies on past. On her back window, there__ a sticker: NO FEAR. I think, good girl.