I was up early this morning, leaving my brother’s house to drive the 25 miles to my mom and dad’s where I left the girls. It was strange weather last night – weirdly lit upside-down dinner roll clouds scattered around clear patches, followed by tremendous and sudden thunder and lightning, but very little rain. At 6:30 this morning there was fog as I set out on the highway.

The gray mists made it easy to imagine I was out at sea. Occasionally the hulking shapes of semis would appear out of the gray like freighters bound for distant ports. I had Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast CD turned on, and as the song “The Oh of Pleasure” played it seemed as if the lights of approaching cars came out of the fog in the same way the ethereal notes of Lynch’s melody emerged from the rhythm.

Fog is unpredictable. At one point ahead and well above me it cleared for few moments and I could see the top of a telecommunications booster tower, it’s transmitters standing out like oversized ears, but I couldn’t see the base of the tower. It was the type of sky where I could easily imagine God opening a trap-door, like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with beams of light radiating, to pronounce a mission for me (but first, “stop grovelling.”)

Perhaps a mission is what I need. The fog and the familiar road I was driving were a little too apt a metaphor. I knew pretty much where I was and where I was going and what was immediately ahead, but everything else seemed so mysterious. This was the road I chose, but maybe I ought to check out my GPS – God Positioning System – to make sure I’m on the right track. As I’m thinking this, I recall what Cheeseburger Brown said earlier this year in his excellent “The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster” illumination:

“Just because you cannot see the path, doesn’t mean it isn’t under your feet.”

Amen.

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