Back biters and syndicators
Standing all around the door
An’ it wished ’bout ev’ryday
Hopin’ I’d go way to stay
Ooo-ooo-wee, ooo
Almost ruin my happy home
Ooo-wee-ooo
Almost ruin my happy home

(Al Smith and John Lee Hooker)

It’s Friday and it is now about 9 PM and I am about to exit on to Route 18 for the last leg of my trip home to New Jersey.  With Little Steven’s Underground Garage set on my XM radio, I hear John Lee Hooker’s Back Biters and Syndicators begin to play.  I grab one of the three harmonicas on the console,  an “A” harp and it blends right in, happy that I got it right the first time.

Six hours earlier I had left work, got gas, and hit the road.

More than two hours later I was just getting off the DC beltway and heading towards Baltimore on I-95.

One hour later I was stopped in gridlock north of Baltimore where the express lanes converged with the four or five normal lanes.

Somewhere in this mess on the overpass above with a chain link fence, climate control advocates were holding a sign and waving their arms trying to get the impatient drivers below to beep their horns in support, or maybe, I thought,  trying to dispel the carbon monoxide being pumped out of the sea of cars below them.

It reminded me of what driving the beltway and interstates in late September of 2001 would have looked like.  You could barely travel under an overpass that didn’t have an American flag on it with people rallying support for our country recently attacked by terrorists.

What a difference eighteen years makes, I thought.  You don’t see too many American flags anymore.  Maybe we have just forgotten, or maybe some are just afraid of being labeled.

When I first moved to the Washington DC area, I used to drive home to Jersey pretty much every weekend.  I had an old 1969 C10 pickup truck and off I would go.  Generally it was a three and one half hour ride.

Now forty years later the trip I started at 3PM doesn’t begin to wind down until six hours later.  Thankfully around 9:30PM I arrive.

It’s now Sunday afternoon and I am ready to start my trip back, hoping this time the drive won’t be so long.

But before leaving I decide to take a trip past the stretch of Long Branch beaches I used to hang at.  I passed the Church of the Presidents, now closed for renovation and remember the time when I was twelve or so and spent the day sitting with my grandfather as he displayed his paintings.  He won a gold medal for his portrait of John Kennedy.

Then on down Ocean Avenue to West End, back in the day it was once referred to as the Greenwich Village of the Jersey shore and past the restaurant where I got my first job.

Finally at the North End beach where I spent most of my teenage years, I got out and took a photo.  It has all changed now.

Now ready to start my way back home I hope for swifter travel and line up my harmonicas for this ride.

It was a good trip.

Now I am ready to return to my happy home.
Ooo-wee-ooo