Mile 197 on 1-80 in Wyoming

Kris and I are excellent singers; loud and excellent like an overstuffed dryer or a bandsaw. I sing in violent break outs while Kris has been buzzing through audible wood slabs since I met him.

Kris is excited by everything. I often find myself wishing I knew the things I know now when I was a kid so that I could have been informed while still gazing through the awe-filled eyes of a child. "I wish I knew that when I was a kid," is a mantra Kris doesn't know; instead, he points out every plain and purple mountain.


He uses different voices when he sings: Scratchy Dylan voice, pseudo brit rocker voice, squealy- breathy Ween voice. He dances and collapse through each of them as I slip in and out of love with him. Big rocks excite him, red buildings are note worthy, and everything coming from the stereo is celebrated. Kris looks at the world through the eyes of a god he doesn't even believe in. For those who can see this way, everything is fascinating, brilliant, and inherently perfect. People with eyes framed by glorious-god-goggles can see the world as new while knowing all along the origin of everything. These people, people like Kris, not only have eyes that can see like god, but hands that can make anything, and chests burning with adventure though they are in no hurry to get any place.

I read him my writing about the god goggles and he says, "Wow baby you say some damn nice things about me."

"Well, I have been stuck in a car with you for a long, long time."

"And then you don't."

We laugh. He gets anxious and asks to return to Purple Rain. I am feeling introverted and am happy to see him go. "I would die for you" complete with hand motions, and I am annoyed that I am not annoyed by this. Instead I am fascinated, and secretly wish that the children we have not yet made, are as strange and beautiful as Kris.

In the slew of our curly-haired, make-believe offspring we'd inevitably produce one like me. A conflicted--baby. She would be born with a terribly conflicted name like Blanch or the feminine Michael. She would always want to scream and cry and shake her miniature cankled appendages at God, then feel bad for thinking it, or too lazy to actually follow through with it.

So, she'll brut. She'll watch her brothers and sisters in the front of the car, Dad's monster arm around the lot of them, pointing out stars , hills, windmills, contrasting colors, pitched roofs, phone lines, birds on phone lines, epic guitar riffs, construction and car crashes, grey factories, a forgotten piece of furniture, a thirsty landscape littered with the red block letters A-D-U-L-T, stray dogs, authentic american antelope, and stupid and beautiful people. Blanch- Michael would watch as her siblings smother each other with explanations about the root system of an oak tree or philosophy. Small Blanchy will sit on her prune hands as the kids in the front drop bombs on each other; bombs with plumply hand-pained ladies on them. The children of the front of Dad's car reined bombs of ethics and time/ space travel on each other until their brilliant child-minds burst all over, leaving the inhabitants of the car sick with the cancer of inquiry.


Our smug little daughter would sit in the back seat, arms folded over her fiery little chest, loving and hating her family for loving and gushing over one-anothers imperfections. Then I would touch her back, I would push my fingers in her brittle, baby spine until her mussels exhaled. She'd scowl at me like a cat and I will smile. I will show her how to reach her cubby arms up and stretch them behind her thumpy little head. I'd show my daughter how to lean into her own folded hands like a tiny wicker pillow. I will teach her to relax, I will teach her what her father first taught me.


I read this to Kris and he cooed and gushed as he always does, my lumber-jack cheerleader. I returned to my computer screen and gave in to the introverted me. Kris returned to his precious Dylan.

Then suddenly between some consonant and vowel we were parked, Kris was crying, and then, there at mile 197 on 1-80 somewhere in yellow-gray Wyoming we were engaged.

There was no one knee, no audience, no white horse. There was only Kris's red and naked face and my chubby ring finger wearing this strange metal like an itchy sweater. I had said yes. Kris was resting now. It was finished. What the hell does one say now? Just a moment ago he and I were so exposed: crying and laughing, cut open and bundled up. He asked me to marry him in a Wyoming ditch, among the wrappers and empty water bottles hogging the interior of my car, he looked me in my face and asked me to be his wife while I was still wearing my DEVO energy dome. It was the proposal of a working man, the wedding song of the everyday, we were two people sitting in our road-trip people filth and he asked me an inherently Kris question and I answered a very, very Jamie answer.