My alarm went off at 7am, and I was in my cousin’s car by 7:30. She had driven in two days prior from her apartment in Rochester NY (where she was pursuing a doctorate in bio-chemical engineering) and was more than willing to have me along for the schlep. We were to break up the half-day’s drive into two, so that she could spend the night at her boyfriend’s in Syracuse, and we could both visit our youngest cousin who had just begun her freshman year.
On the way out of town, we stopped at a charming country diner to breakfast with a few of her high-school friends: one of whom I vaguely remembered from bat mitzvahs past. After the requisite general life updates, conversation turned to my trip, and then to the status of a re-invented tape-measure that a boyfriend had been working to patent.
After wiping residue chocolate-chip pancake from the corners of my mouth, we got in the car and headed west.
[If there was ever a stretch of highway I felt close to, it was the Massachusetts Turnpike. I-90 stretches intermittently from Boston’s airport in the middle of the harbor, to Seattle’s football stadium on the coast of the sound. I grew up a fifteen minute walk north of the thoroughfare, and went to college a twenty minute drive south; I took it’s east-bound lanes to dinners in Cambridge, and it’s westbound lanes to summers in Tolland, while crossing it every day on my way to high-school. Disc-man in pocket, I’d pedal the overpass and marvel at the 8th wonder of the world: the Shaw’s Supermarket on Austin street built squarely on-top of the pike. For a while, there was a stretch of about a mile of the road, just west of my house, that I barely knew; the closest access roads to 209 Derby street pointed eastbound only, so if the family was driving downtown we’d use the Washington Street entrance, but if we were heading west, we'd need to drive the extra five minuets to get on exit 14. But by the end of college, due to an overabundance of Chinatown buses and treks out to Geneseo, the entirety of I-90 east of Rochester felt quite familial (with the exception of the bitchy part that cuts right through Albany, which one can easily avoid by jumping on 87 for a hot minute). I ended up hugging the interstate until Minneapolis MN, and then again from Helena MT to it’s westward port. Diatribe about the beauty and power of driving alongside the Erie Canal.]
I offered to pay for some of our tank of gas, but my cousin told me to save my money for stranger rides. We passed the time with talk of family.
While I approached Syracuse with the same attitude I’dve approached any New Yengland post-industrial/depressive little-city I was somewhat struck by her skyline. Or rather, how it felt to roar by its few oldschool buildings on the upper-deck of a highway that seamed to perfectly bisect the town.
[I loved sailing into cities like that; elevated roads or ramps that fly you past the second or third story windows of buildings. It felt romantic, like the opening montage of Futurama. I’ll describe the feeling more eloquently if I ever get to day 212 and what its like to take a bus into South Station).
For a brief moment, I thought “shit - was there something I should have seen - like actually checked out - in Amherst? Might Syracuse be kind of cool? Is the adventure starting?”
It wasn’t.
We arrived at my cousin’s boyfriend’s place while he was still at work, and I set up camp on a black wire-framed futon in his one-bedroom basement apartment. The place felt musty, due mostly to the worn carpeting and quarter-length/forehead-level windows. I lazed around. A few hours later we picked up our younger cousin at her dorm, and ate dinner at the Spaghetti Warehouse; a stone, early 20th century manufacturing building turned mediocre Italian restaurant. It felt big, but somewhat cozy, in-spite of the cheesy tomato-sauce-recipe posters and red-and-white-checkered vinyl table-clothes. While scouring the menu, my cousin, slightly queer in her ways, was anxious to find a pasta dish containing peas. She ordered it as a special.
With plans to see her in the morning, we dropped our younger cousin back at her dorm, and returned home. The rest of the evening consisted of minimal hanging back at the apartment, (mostly revolving around youtube I believe), followed by a descent night’s sleep.
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