Get your kicks

The beginning of my restless youth. Route 66 with Tod & Buz as Harvard & Hell’s Kitchen,

shot in black & white in Butte & Cleveland, Punta Gorda, Carlsbad, Corpus Christi.

Writing I loved by Stirling Silliphant with titles like “Ever Ride the Waves in Oklahoma”

& actor-legends Buster Keaton, Bob Duvall, Julie Newmar, Sessue Hayakawa.

In my fave: Buz & Tod cruise past the Fort Pitt Tunnel,

laughing, “Goodbye Pittsburgh ... Hello World”

but circle back to gather Ethel Waters’ old friends one more time before she dies in Pittsburgh.

When I was 16, my rose-petal-eating English teacher told us: Just do a project for the year, don’t bother me.

So I wrote a script for Tod & Buz & it was lame but what I learned: Sure, it would be great to be

winsome Inger Stevens or earthy Zohra Lampert, but maybe, kicks enough, to write the stories.

This June, my niece Holly drove the Mother Road. I said, Don’t miss anything! Not cornfields, chili fries,

maple syrup farms, not the Big Texan Steak House in dusty Amarillo, or the boho coffee houses in Albuque —

or La Posada where Einstein & Gary Cooper once stayed in Winslow, Arizona. But not together.

Joan E. Bauer is the author of “The Almost Sound of Drowning” (Main Street Rag, 2008). She lives in East Liberty/Shadyside. She co-hosts and curates the Hemingway’s Summer Poetry Series with Jimmy Cvetic. This poem was previously published in Iconoclast.