10,000 Miles With My Dead Father's Ashes by Devin Galaudet

Author:Devin Galaudet [Galaudet, Devin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Travel, Europe, Spain & Portugal, Essays & Travelogues
ISBN: 9781947856165
Google: L0B8tAEACAAJ
Amazon: 1947856162
Goodreads: 38461943
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Published: 2018-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

My itinerary was hectic, changing by the moment. Daria from the office of Cádiz Tourism called daily with updates. I thought about Daria often. Our initial meeting was brief and she was only being polite, but I could not help seeing myself lightly holding her hand, our fingers barely intertwined, walking through a path of golden leaves through some park in Spain. It was easy to daydream along the swaying roads of Andalucia, and perhaps not too surprising.

I had used random women to validate me for years. So I pinned the idea of love on Daria, a woman I did not know. The notion that I was still an angry, jittery twig covered with acne persisted long after my life improved both physically and financially.

Andalucia consisted of various hotel stops and lengthy meetings with vice-president-of-marketing types, who sat with me and gave me tapas galore and touted their destination as being more authentic than the last place I had visited, somehow more Spanish, relaxing, idyllic, or corporate.

Oddly, all the hotels I visited were the quintessential part of Spain the industry hoped to project. Hillside converted monasteries that overlooked fields of wine grapes. Quaint fifteenth-century homes divided into unique guest rooms. In all of them, I sat and sipped tea in a courtyard surrounded by overgrown plants. I should have fawned over the delightful quiet and ambiance, but I didn’t. The childhood I was given had me feeling sorry for myself about Dad.

I wanted the type of father who would lean with me over the motor of a stalled car and teach me how to fix it. I wanted to have a talk about the birds and the bees before the health class permission slip and before I stuck my hand down the front of some girl’s panties.

I fell in love with books when I could admit to myself that my parents were not starring in Father Knows Best and I had to discover the answers for myself. I learned from the instructions in books and didn’t have to wait for my parents to come around. In fairness, I should’ve been grateful for what I received from them, but I was too entitled, sitting in a five-hundred-year-old parlor slurping tea from a fragile china cup in Spain, to see beyond my own selfishness. All the driving from appointment to appointment with Dad, alone with my thoughts, was getting to me.

I had been driving for a good hour and a half. The two-lane road to Grazelima snaked along a narrow path with sheer drops on both sides beyond the road’s miniscule shoulder.

I have never been a fan of heights, and the combination of a windy mountain road, a lack of guardrails, and not being sure where I was headed made me uneasy. It was morning, and a couple of cars had crept up behind me. I drove slowly. There was no place to pull over to let them pass.

They honked. I perspired.

After several miles of my not pulling over, which eventually

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