I left Canyon in the late morning since I had to wait for the final remnants of the storm to clear. Somewhere east of Amarillo, the crosswind hit me sideways. A steady push, not gusty—almost like it had intent. I gritted my teeth, leaned hard, and watched a truck in the distance rock and settle—like it had reconsidered its loyalties. As the highway straightened near a sign for Panhandle, Texas, a different kind of memory broke loose, one that everyone in my family has tried to forget.
Back in 2020, five years before this ride, I was standing in my kitchen in North Carolina, mid-dinner prep, when my phone buzzed. Mom’s name on the screen. I wiped my hands and answered brightly, trying to summon good news.
“We sold both of the houses over the weekend,” she said.
At that time, my parents had owned two homes, one in Ohio and another in Las Vegas, and the real estate market that summer moved like quicksilver. “Wow,” I said. “When do you have to be out?”
“That’s the problem,” she replied. “Las Vegas closes in three weeks. Ohio closes in five.”
What followed was a month of chaos—of scrambling to close out two lives in two places, so they could consolidate it all in their new Arizona house—the one that wasn’t quite finished. I pushed my editorial deadlines ahead, rented the largest SUV available at the airport, and made one last pilgrimage to Ohio. I’d done that drive a hundred times since leaving in 1982, but this would be the last time my parents would meet me at the other end of the road.
I pulled into the driveway five days later, half-expecting to see the house as stripped down inside as the front yard now looked without the giant Norway maple where our last family photo had been staged. No such luck, I would soon learn.
My dad—his Johnny-Carson good looks now dulled by exhaustion—dragged a full garbage tote to the curb. “You’ve got to help your mother get rid of stuff,” he said. “I’m not gonna rent a storage unit in Arizona.”
Mom’s not a hoarder; she’s a preservationist with a militant sense of order. She’d long warned us, “Don’t part with any of this. It’ll be worth more than memories one day.” I was never sure about that—nothing in her collection looked like the treasures that fetched stratospheric prices on Antiques Roadshow. I decided to just fill the SUV with whatever she wanted me to have and deal with it later. Out of sight, out of mind.
The house wasn’t the one I’d grown up in, but it was full of echoes. With each move, Mom had culled what no longer pleased her and carefully boxed what she believed would one day hold value: Heisey glass, Occupied Japan figurines, and a chalkware Catholic monk that exhaled incense through its mouth—a novelty that peaked in the mid-’70s, alongside fondue pots and macramé owls.
My friend Jill came from Akron the next day. She had no attachment to any of it and showed me how to start listing furniture on Facebook Marketplace. Mom was scandalized by the prices. “It’s worth more than that!”
“Turn this around, Mom. People are paying you to haul this off.”
Dad grinned. “Yeah, this is good business!”
She didn’t admit defeat, not exactly. But I could feel her letting go—if not of the objects themselves, then of the need to be right about their worth. The woman who’d spent decades making things happen—clipping poodles, selling Decorama, running an ice cream shop, building an insurance agency with my dad—finally stepped into the passenger seat. I took the wheel, wondering how long I’d get to hold it before my own sons reached for it.
Dad had hired one moving company for Las Vegas and another for Ohio. Somehow, the infamous Victorian sleigh squeaked in as the last item the movers’ van could accommodate.
I’d done my part by hauling a load home to North Carolina in an overstuffed SUV—but it still wasn’t enough to make a proper dent in the volume. A few days later, they rolled out of Ohio in a two-car convoy: Dad in a rented 26 foot U-Haul, Mom behind him in the Sienna van, carrying what couldn’t fit in the other vehicles—and the quiet weight of six decades, packed with care.
That’s how they ended up in Panhandle, Texas.
They’d exited for gas near a Love’s Truck Stop, and something went wrong with the U-Haul. The cruise control didn’t disengage, the exit ramp curved too hard, and the load was too high and too heavy. Mom, in the van behind him, saw it happen: the truck tipped, skidded, and slid—on its side—for at least 70 yards before coming to a stop. Ten feet more and he’d have hit the steel poles holding up the Love’s sign.
She thought she was witnessing his death.
As she walked toward the wreck, bracing for the worst, she later told me that a small woman of Asian descent appeared—out of nowhere—and said, calmly, “He’s going to be okay.” Whether it was an angel, a bystander, or an apparition doesn’t matter. In that moment, she believed it. And it steadied her. Every time she retells the story, it includes this vital detail.
Truckers raced over from the diesel bays, volunteer first responders in ball caps and reflective vests. They smashed the windshield to get my dad out.
Dad’s life must have flashed before his eyes—mine did, just hearing the story.
Dad’s life must have flashed before his eyes—mine did, just hearing the story.
I didn’t see the slide, but I saw the video Mom took of the recovery. I watched it more than once—not out of morbid curiosity, but because some part of me needed to believe the ending. To witness the outcome. To reassure myself that he really was okay.
They both walked away with bruises, mostly the emotional type—a fact that still feels impossible to me. Within days they were back behind the wheel, tracing the same desert routes as if muscle memory could outdrive time. It was like they filed the UHaul wreck away under “close call” and kept moving. Maybe they kept moving because stopping—really stopping—would’ve meant reckoning with all the ways their lives were shifting. The crash should’ve been a reckoning, but for Dad it was another near-miss folded into the narrative of luck. He’s always believed that if you just keep moving, the road will clear.
After all, every miracle has a half-life.
I’ve never stopped admiring their grit. It’s just harder now, watching that same grit turn inward, against the tide. Mom still drives, but it’s no longer a given that she’ll remember where she’s headed—or who’s with her. Once, she pulled away from a rest stop while Dad was still in the bathroom. She came back. But what if she hadn’t? What if he’d left his phone in the van? There are too many variables now. Scary math.
Dad doesn’t watch her every move. Nobody can, and she’d pick up on the surveillance if they did. So he fades out, sometimes, to a place where he doesn’t have to think about what might go wrong. YouTube is his codependent.
We used to joke about my great-grandfather—Dad’s Grandpa White. We called him Mr. Magoo, after the old cartoon character who wandered through construction zones with a walking stick and bowler hat, blissfully unaware of the danger around him. Nearsighted to the point of farce, but somehow, everything always worked out.
As Dad ages, I see more of that in him too. He’s not oblivious; he’s selective. He has a gift—or maybe a curse—for ignoring unpleasant things until they resolve on their own. Once he does see something and it lands, though? He can be like a dog with a bone. A sleeping giant, wide awake.
For all my talk about being an observant little girl, I have that Magoo quality too. When it comes to uncomfortable truths right in front of me, I tell myself I’m watching the long arc, when it’s really a form of denial. That’s probably why I ignored all the early signs of Mom and Dad’s aging. Not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t want it to be true. I kept looking down the road, convinced there would be more time. More clarity. More warning. That’s the Magoo way, after all—blind luck and forward motion.
Trying to stay present doesn’t always mean taking charge. Sometimes it just means letting the blurry bits come into focus—and resisting the urge to squint past them.
Easier said than done.
By the time I crossed back into my own lane of the present, the road had stretched into an endless gray ribbon, wind tugging at my sleeves again. Seventy-five miles east of the infamous Panhandle truck stop, I stopped at the Mesquite Canyon Steakhouse—a joint that’s survived since the Eisenhower era and plans to outlive us all. I ordered the Texas Tater and took a seat at a resin-coated table embedded with cowboy poetry and old postcards. The table itself felt like a time capsule.
I was torn between two motivations: one, to get back on the road and outrun the rain I’d seen gathering on the radar; the other, to linger and let my meal convert to heat. Looking at Google Maps, expediency won. I didn’t want to be caught in what was coming—a cold front in the rain is the worst kind of motorcycle misery. I can ride in cold. I can ride in drizzle. But riding in both, when the wind cuts through every layer and the road loses traction? It burrows into my spine and doesn’t leave.
I geared up, paid my bill, and went out to the bike. I hadn’t mounted up yet; instead, I turned the bike with my body toward the gravel lot’s exit to give me a straight shot for the road.
A not-so-late-model Jaguar sedan pulled in behind me, angled so the driver could speak to me directly through his window. He was probably in his fifties, sharply dressed in a fitted green t-shirt, wearing a good bit of jewelry on his hands and neck. Not dusty, not down-and-out; he’d probably showered that morning. But his voice—East Coast, New York state or thereabouts—carried tension under the polish.
“Are you local?” he asked. “I need to find a tire shop.”
Then he added, more to the windshield than to me, “I’m shredding the tires with this load. Don’t think I can make it to a city for new ones. Was hoping there was some country place around here that might have some ideas.”
I pointed back at my license plate. “North Carolina. Sorry. No idea.” Then an afterthought: “You could try looking it up online.”
He hesitated—like that hadn’t occurred to him, or like he didn’t want to. He nodded, sort of, and looked away.
Another idea occurred. “You might be safer riding along the old Route 66,” I offered. “It’s parallel to I-40, and you won’t have to keep highway speeds.”
He gave a faint, distracted nod.
As he shifted into gear, I looked inside his car as closely as good manners would permit. Everything was covered by blankets, but one of them had the unmistakable outline of a home safe. Through a slight seam between two of the blankets, its digital keypad caught the light. What in the world?
He pulled away, slow and awkward, the Jaguar straining under its cargo.
I didn’t feel great about my response—but I didn’t feel bad either. Did he really expect a random stranger in a gravel parking lot to hold the key to his problems? Nah. He wasn’t asking for help, not really—he just needed someone to confirm what he already knew: the wheels were coming apart, and the road ahead might not take him where he thought he was going.
I appreciate the balance of two wheels. Not just for the ride, but for what it teaches: every load is felt. Every shift in weight, every corner, every wind. Pack light, or pay for it. I’ve talked myself out of buying something plenty of times, just knowing I couldn’t haul it home. That doesn’t make me a paragon of virtue—I’ve also shipped things home when I couldn’t resist—but you take my point.
Sometimes more is just more, and a bit of enforced discipline is a gift from the gods.
It hit me as I merged back onto the interstate a couple of miles later: I’d faced two kinds of weight that day—one from the past, one in the present. Neither was mine to carry, but both stayed with me. The difference was, I’d gained experience with leaving a load behind.
Five years ago, it was my parents heading west from the wreck in Panhandle with a van stuffed to the gills. This time, it’s just me, headed the other way. And I’m the one trying to balance the load as I head back to North Carolina—not just what’s strapped to the bike, but what’s strapped to me: the memories, the unfinished business, the ache of watching roles reverse.
I didn’t fully register it at the time, but those stories my neighbors shared back in Dispatch One about aging and declining weren’t just nostalgic laments. They were quiet road signs. Gentle flags planted by people who’d already crossed into this terrain of reversed roles and slow grief.
My neighbors weren’t trying to stop me—just preparing me gently: the road ahead gets rougher. But maybe that’s what it means to keep riding anyway—to balance the load, feel the drag, and keep moving through the wind.
