'Nuff Read: Blue Highways

For about fifteen years I have been carrying around the book Blue Highways: A Journey Into America by William Least Heat-Moon. I bought a paperback version of the book while in college, while I was in my "On the Road" stage and the cover gave me the sense this was a similarly themed story. As I've gotten older and gained (pleasurable and painful) life experience, I find the book becoming more relevant to my own life. Least heat-Moon wrote a grand story of Small moments by recording his interactions as he traveled the country in his van.

This past summer, my wife was briefly hospitalized, and during this time I picked up the book again and began reading. As I read the book, I was quickly drawn again into Least Heat-Moon's slice of life anecdotes. His trip is prompted by his failed relationship and quest to get a better sense of himself, our country, and his place in it. Seeing and fearing for my wife, I began to search a little for my place in the communities I operate in, but most carefully, in the communal partnership that is my marriage.

Pulling back from Least Heat-Moon's story of his travels across America, I began to consider the anecdotes, moments and passing interactions that have shaped my relationship with my wife and family, and started to recognize how even the slightest interaction causes ripples throughout, effecting how she and I perceive our past and the reality that even the smallest moment will also effect (possibly) our future.

My wife is feeling better now and as our life returns to normalcy (whatever that means) I have thought about a context for sharing the moments that transpire in my life that speak to the sense of community I hope to reflect and explore on with this blog... the community of family, the community of neighborhood, the community of "place", and the world community. From time to time I will post anecdotes which I will call My Blue Highways, as well as sharing those I come across on the information super (occasionally) highway. If, as Barnes and Noble's notes in its annotated bibliography of the book, "the power of Heat-Moon's writing and his delight in the overlooked and the unexamined capture a sense of our national destiny, the true American experience," then I KNOW we all have journey's which warrant examination...