"Whose sore task does not divide the Sunday from the week"

 I am riding the thruway for the foreseeable future. I'm not complaining about it, because it's good to have the work. Basically every day from now until Christmas (I do get Thanksgiving off) I'll be driving somewhere to play a concert, and very often driving to two places to do multiple concerts. (Buffalo and Syracuse are just close enough to be able to get from an afternoon show in one place to an evening show in the other.)

So, I am sorry that I am not available to get together for Christmas drinks or invite you over for a cup of coffee. I'm driving somewhere, or sitting on stage somewhere, or finally back home and have fallen asleep still in my suit collapsed in the chair.

There are many things that I'll miss about the next few weeks. I'll miss participating in the Christmas decorating with the boys, and I'll miss pretty much all of the upcoming Bills games. I'll miss my wife, who hopefully can still recognize me on Christmas morning, and I'll also miss the days when it wasn't dark before 5 pm. 

But there are some consolations. I have hours of audiobooks ready to listen to on the thruway, and I've never felt more ready to notice the natural features of the drive. There are plenty of miles of driving in Upstate New York that are flat, featureless, and grim. But when driving in daylight I've spent years cataloging a list (I keep the actual physical copy of it in my book) of the features of I-90. 

Did you know, for example, that there are some ruined stone arches just visible through the treeline at mile marker 296? Or that you can find egrets on the eastern side of the Montezuma preserve at marker 313? There is an enormous stand of Norway spruce on the north side of mile 408, and there are innumerable creeks (Flint, Black, Tonawanda, White Bottom) that pass under the thruway that become more interesting once their names are known. The same with the farms--like Meadville, Dendis, and Del-Mar, that I learned to look for once I knew their names.

I've tried to treat the drive like a a London Cabbie learning "The Knowledge." It all has to be memorized and internalized, and once it's been ingrained through a hundred repetitions you all of a sudden know the rhythm of the city. (Or, in my case, the 128 mile straight line.)

The next four weeks are going to be largely awful. But there is some joy and interest even in the most boring part of the task.