Departure: a farce in three acts

My original plan for Friday went like this: doctor's appointment at 8:00, get home by 9:00, hit the road at 10:00, arrive at Gen's on Cape Cod at about 4:00 p.m. The reality: the doctor's appointment was the only thing that went off on schedule. From there on, things just sort of unraveled.

Act I

After Doctor Zathureczky OK'd my blood pressure and serum triglyceride levels, I went home, loaded a few last things into Gertie and then headed down to Suburban Propane to get my brand-new tank filled up. But on the way I passed Kadco, a local mom-and-pop RV dealership, and saw a sign saying they refilled propane tanks. Fine! I could save some time by not driving all the way down to Suburban.

Well, not so fine, as it turned out. First, Kadco took a good half hour (!) to fill my new tank, a job that should have required five or ten minutes at most. Then they informed me that they couldn't accept my old tank for disposal—"Oh, you'll have to take that down to Suburban Propane." I gritted my teeth as I realized that I would have been better off going to Suburban in the first place.

And there was another problem—although this one wasn't Kadco's fault. Gertie's propane tank compartment is so cramped that the old tank and its hardware (regulator and hose) just barely fit. But the new regulator assembly is just a trifle longer than the old one. After I had wrestled the newly filled tank—all 72 pounds of it—into the compartment and tried to connect the regulator, I found out that it didn't fit!

It was at this propitious moment that the skies opened up and it started to rain. After struggling with the tank for several minutes in a bone-chilling downpour, I managed to wedge it in at an angle so the regulator and hose just barely squeezed in and I was able to shut the door. But I'm going to have to do something about that regulator...it certainly isn't a practical setup the way it is.

Act II

So I drove onward to Suburban Propane, where they were nice enough to take custody of my old tank (for a ten dollar fee)...then to Home Depot, where I bought a dead-blow mallet (for a breathtaking $27.95, but I had no time to price-shop) in hopes of getting my slightly bent outside mirrors knocked into better alignment...then back up the road to Radio Shack for more Superlock tape and a couple of ferrite cores to try to get rid of the alternator whine in Gertie's new stereo system. (They didn't help). By this time it was well past noon and I was ravenous, so I made a stop at Mr. B's Restaurant for a cheese steak sandwich, which I took home and wolfed down while composing an email to Gen saying that I was leaving late and would be there sometime after 8:00 pm.

Finally I said goodbye for the second time to my cat Marie, who by this time was looking rather puzzled by all the comings and goings...and headed out at 3:00 p.m., only five hours behind schedule. There were no traffic problems in northern New Jersey (I'd feared there might be due to the World Trade Center attack just three days before), and I was beginning to tell myself the worst was over...when I got into Connecticut.

Act III

This is when I discovered that the major cities in Connecticut have staggered working hours. There's no other explanation: just as rush hour in one city is at its peak, rush hour is beginning in the next city up the road (I-95 in this case). It certainly worked out that way for me...in three hours of driving through the state, I managed to hit each city at the exact worst point in its rush hour. It had to be planned!

I stopped once for a light supper of baked lemon pepper tofu and unsalted pretzels. I know that's an odd-sounding combination, but hey! it was quick to prepare. And I called Gen and told her to go to bed—I'd park in the driveway whenever I got there and see her in the morning.

Along the way I saw lots of American flags—on cars, in front of businesses, draped over highway overpasses. I saw knots of people standing by the highway holding flags and candles...an impromptu vigil for the victims of Tuesday's terrorist attacks. The candles flickering in the darkness brought tears to my eyes, I must admit.

Once I got out of Connecticut, traffic resumed a more or less normal speed. As I cruised on through the night—good thing I've made this trip a few times before—I thought about how I'd met Gen. It was ten years ago or more. She was recently divorced and had moved from New York City to a cottage on Cape Cod. Some friends had convinced her to get a Mac and get online—which in those days meant America Online; everything else was too hard to use for a beginner. I was something of a graphics expert and had been invited to be an "AFC"—an AOL Forum Consultant—in the Mac Graphics forum. I spent a couple of hours a day answering graphics questions for visitors and managing the forum libraries. In return AOL gave me unlimited free connect time (this was back in the "pay by the hour" days when free time was really worth something), so I roamed pretty freely around the system.

I met Gen in the Deaf/Hard of Hearing Forum; I think it was her second week online and she had just been exploring when our paths crossed. We soon struck up a correspondence, and I was impressed by her irreverent spirit, as well as her breadth of knowledge. She called herself "MacGrandma," but she sounded a lot livelier than any grandmother I'd known!

Gen went on to found the AOL "Kids Only OnLine" area—KOOL—against the advice of AOL's management, who told her there was no audience for such a thing. She proved them wrong in spades—by its second anniversary KOOL was one of AOL's top 10 areas in popularity. Gen looked after her KOOL kids like a grandmother, and it was like a big family. At her invitation, I hosted a folder in KOOL called "Ask Andy" in which I answered all kinds of questions about science and technology. It was a blast! I have a pretty good store of miscellaneous knowledge and I enjoy explaining things in simple, understandable language, so this suited me to a T. I got to interact with some really smart kids, too, which was fun. They asked all kinds of challenging questions, so I learned a lot in answering them. (If you want to see what it was like, there's a log of the first six months' "Ask Andy" posts that you can browse. Hey, you might learn something too!)

But once KOOL got really big, it attracted the greedy eyes of AOL management, who decided that this could be turned into a major moneymaker. So they took the kids' area away from Gen and turned it into a heavily commercialized promotional venue for the big movie studios and toymakers...who of course paid AOL a tidy sum for the privilege of flogging their wares online. It wasn't a family any more...and I stopped writing "Ask Andy." Eventually AOL got so dreadful that I quit—most of the offsite staffers did too. But AOL keeps sending out those CD-ROMs, and people who don't know any better keep signing up, not realizing that in every customer satisfaction survey for the past five years, AOL has come in dead last. (EarthLink consistently tops the ratings.) But I digress...

Anyway, by then Gen and I were fast friends. She invited me to come up and visit her on Cape Cod, and I drove up there and spent a week. We had a great time talking, walking the beach and visiting local places. Her two grown daughters were scandalized that Mom was inviting this "stranger" to her house after meeting him on the internet! They were sure I'd prove to be an axe murderer. But then they don't use the internet—so they never understood the KOOL phenomenon, or how much Gen meant to all those kids, or how you can become close friends without meeting face to face.

Ever since then, whenever I'm up in the Boston area I stop in and see Gen. When I found out that she had a huge collection of records but nothing to play them on (her ex-husband had kept the stereo system), I sent her my spare hifi gear. She sent Christmas presents to me and my cats from her and her dog. We exchange recipes, book recommendations (and books!) and Mac tips. Over the years she has worked in a local bookstore; worked online as a staff trainer and manager for AOL (until she too got fed up with the politics and commercialism and quit); and now has her own bookselling business online. (More about that later.) Always she's been a delight, full of good advice, warmhearted support and unexpected bits of obscure knowledge (the kind I like best). The internet has brought me many friends, but Gen is the oldest and dearest.

I crossed the Bourne Bridge onto Cape Cod around 10:15 and pulled into Gen's driveway fifteen minutes later. Gen had sensibly taken my advice and gone to bed, but her companion Patrick Skelly was still up and came outside to greet me briefly. Exhausted, I turned in almost immediately and slept well in the cool weather...except for a dream about a jetliner flying low over my head and crashing in flames right in front of me.