Notes From the Road: The Optimism of Spring

April is the Cruelest Month

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April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

— T.S. Elliot; The Waste Land

It’s another night, another dinner rush, another chance to get out of my apartment and mine some ambient cash from the digital ether.

The temperature is pleasant, somewhere around the high 60s to low 70s, but my car is a sweltering oven when I climb in, the black leather oozing stored solar energy like a heatsink. I start to open the delivery app, but then remember that I have a few library books in the back seat that needed to be returned days ago. I do a search through my GPS for area branches, and pick one I’ve never been to that looks to be located in the general direction I’m heading anyway.

It’s a quick trip, only a few miles, and the building is in a nice little commercial district I’ve only just recently discovered. It’s a modern structure, all brick and glass and coated steel, and I head inside, curious whether it might make for a good hangout spot when I need to get some reading done and am feeling like I need to get out of my little prison apartment.

The name of the branch is “Oberlin,” which reminds me of something. There’s a place in Northern Arizona I vaguely remember as having the same name. I spend ten minutes searching online for it before I figure out I’m thinking of a place called Heber-Overgaard, which has some of the same sounds but is a a very different name. I’m not sure why I spent the time trying to solve that mystery, except for the satisfaction of scratching the the itch of almost-but-not-quite forgetting.

The library looks decently sized from the parking lot, but turns out to be more sparse on the inside than I’d hoped. I miss the kinds of libraries where you could get lost in endless rows of floor-to-ceiling shelves. I drop off my overdue materials and briskly peruse the collection, conscious of the fact that the dinner rush is on and I should be schlepping. I decided to first familiarize myself with the layout, but as I walk, I begin feeling a familiar twinge. Something in me reacts autonomously every time I walk into a bookstore or library, like an accusing finger pointing straight into my soul, admonishing me for not having finished writing a book of my own yet, and scoffing at me for considering trying to read something new when I should be doing that work. It’s like a pebble in my shoe as I walk the aisles, scanning the titles, and it chafes the most when I breeze through the science fiction section, since that’s my genre of choice. It turns briefly from an irritant into a voice:

“You don’t need anyone else’s style or ideas in your head,” it chides, “you need to develop and do something with your own!”

I get lots of ideas, out on the road. I take notes, send myself emails, grab photos, all of it intended as fodder for later. It’s only when I sit down at my desk back at my place that I am struck dumb, paralyzed before a waiting keyboard and an empty page.

I make my way up the stairs to the non-fiction section on the second floor, but the war inside me has transitioned me from eager to noncommittal. I’m not looking for anything in particular, and nothing is standing out. There are lots of desks and chairs up here, though, and that tells me that if I need somewhere to go work on a project, it might be a decent place, if I can stand the quiet. A little ambient noise helps to tune out the buzz of distraction, I’ve found, but it’s me we’re talking about, and I always find novel ways to be distracted.

I ultimately decide not to get any new books. Not today. I’ve already bought several in the past couple months I need to get through anyway.

Having satisfied my curiosity, I head back downstairs and out the front doors to my car, past concrete planters full of pansies that scatter a riot of bright, contrasting colors along the path of plain, institutional gray.

I turn my chosen app back on — it’s DoorDash tonight — and instead of getting an order from the long row of restaurants just a hundred yards or so to my right, I get something further away, towards downtown. Before long I’m cruising down Glenwood Avenue past rows of well-kept American Foursquare and Georgian Revival homes, charming and quaint, and flip a U-turn to head into a pizza place nestled in an old brick building in Five Points — an intersection of neighborhoods with a kind of retro-modern vibe.

The place is called Lilly’s, and it has an interesting assortment of eclectic decor that captures my attention the second I walk in the door. I’ve never been to this shop before, so I stop for a moment to take it all in.

A collection of reproduced old brand logos, ranging from Coca-Cola to Standard Oil, stamped on tin, lines one wall under a disco ball and the glare of a neon Miller High Life sign. The opposite wall has what I think is an antique icebox covered in stickers, beneath a garish, gold-painted sun medallion with no eyes. On shelves near the bar, an illuminated Area 51 sign, convex and set into green metal framing, catches my attention where it sits just below a waxy-looking statue of the Infant of Prague, flanked by ceramic angels that bear inscriptions reading “Peace” and “Dream.”

I head out with my order to the car, and see a 70-something woman walking out of a cannabis store who appears to have purchased some kind of canine-friendly edibles for the dog of a younger, heavily-pierced woman with a Betty Page haircut who is sitting on the bench outside.

It’s a lovely evening, and the first signs of spring are emerging everywhere: green leaf buds unfurling on most of the trees, multicolored cherry blossoms sprinkled throughout, and the deep, cloying perfume of wisterias reminding me of the scent of the lilac bushes I played in every spring and summer as a young boy at our home in Connecticut.

At an apartment complex called Brighthurst, I leave the pizza on an ornate concrete bench just inside an alcove tucked away from a peaceful courtyard with well-manicured trees and shrubs that feels almost like a Zen garden.

At another stop, two squirrels are busily gnawing on the new buds on a tree, indifferent to my approach.

I like working downtown, even though the parking is harder to come by. I’ve always been a city guy, feeding off the energy and the eclectic fusion of cultures and cuisines and possibilities. Raleigh has all that without the overwhelm that comes with a lot of bigger cities. There’s a vibrancy here, different architectural styles mixing with painted-on murals and the trees that give the place it’s nickname: “The City of Oaks.”

When I came here in the summer of 2024, I came knowing that it was a place for families, not for singles. I came knowing that the only people I would likely know for quite some time — maybe even indefinitely — were my wife and kids.

I did not know that just a year after arriving in this place where I had no roots, no social sphere, no connection other than a superficial aesthetic appreciation and a desire to try something new, that I would wind up being forced to figure out how to inhabit it almost totally alone. Or that even so constrained and isolated, I would have to stay if I wanted to be near the children that I love, even though my opportunities to see them would be very limited.

There’s a darkness that comes welling up out of me when I let myself think about all of this too much. My best days are the days when I manage not to dwell on it at all. I don’t know if that’s healing or just burying, but how can you heal from a wound that refuses to close? The only thing you can really do is dress it and keep it clean, letting the bandages conceal the gruesome reality beneath.

I have not figured out yet how to defeat the solitude, though I try often (and fail just as often) to break the spell. But I decide tonight that I am going to keep working the parts of the city I love, that I will learn the streets and the neighborhoods and the districts, that I will come to make Raleigh my own. I decide, too, that I should keep in mind that even on the nights when work is slow and orders are poor, I’m still being paid to drive these streets, and to learn this place that may well be my home for a long time to come. I may as well come to know it, to inhabit it like it belongs to me.

Perhaps there will be some comfort in that. At least in a kind of familiarity that consoles.

Every time I go out, I see new neighborhoods, or new alcoves of neighborhoods I thought I already knew, like a treasure map unfolding itself to me. I’m still too dependent on my GPS, but I’m starting to create a tentative map in my head.

A building so reflective it shines like a mirror in the waning afternoon sun is labeled “Block 83.” I can barely look at it with the glare in my eyes. Only later, when I review the photo I managed to snap out my driver’s side window, do I realize it’s probably a parking garage.

Block 83 is next to an old stone church, which is itself next to a 60s-style concrete brutalist office building. It’s a mix of everything down here, several kinds of old, and several kinds of new, and several kinds of a fusion of both together.

Carolina barbeque and I haven’t come to terms just yet. I’m not always in the mood for barbeque, but when I am, I think of things like Texas-style brisket and mesquite smoke. My own pulled pork — something I can’t make anymore since there’s no room for my smoker at my new place — could probably bridge the divide between the two, depending on which sauces you used. Admittedly, I’m a fan of the Carolina Gold-style sauces, with their tang of mustard, over anything too cloyingly sweet.

There are lots of barbeque places here in town, though, and while I haven’t patronized them myself yet, my work brings me to them from time to time. I pay particular attention to the aroma of each place as I consider my future plans. If my mouth starts watering when I go in to pick up an order, there’s a good chance I’ll be adding it to my list.

I end up wasting 15 minutes trying to deliver a plastic shopping bag full various flavors of Red Bull that I picked up from a gas station that was more than a little too thug life for my taste. It’s for a guy in a large apartment building who, despite his instructions to do so, can’t be reached to unlock the main doors. Normally, I’d be annoyed with him for wasting my time, but tonight, I don’t care. When I finally do find him, he’s deeply apologetic. It’s amazing how far a little human decency goes in a world full of indifference and indignation.

I don’t remember making the decision to change my attitude about how to approach all this, and maybe my mood will shift to a darker hue again soon, but there’s something about this early burst of Spring that has me in a much more upbeat state of mind than usual. I can drive with the windows down and the sunroof open, at least for now. Before long it’ll be hot and sticky, keeping me trapped inside a series of air-conditions habitats. But for now, it’s all fresh air and the scents of the city and its blossoming foliage on the breeze.

I choose music over audiobooks tonight, and let the algorithm suggest the vibe. Creativity, I find, is often fueled by unexpected juxtaposition. The right music with the right lighting, the right ambience at the right time, it all plays with the colors of your sensory palate in ways you often don’t expect. Randomness is your friend when hoping to discover new combinations.

“Say Something” auto-slots into the playlist, and I start singing along before I find myself almost choking on unexpected tears. There’s a lump in my throat so big I can’t seem to swallow at all, the lyrics pummeling me like sucker punches.

Say something, I’m giving up on you
I’ll be the one, if you want me to
Anywhere, I would’ve followed you
Say something, I’m giving up on you

And I am feeling so small
It was over my head
I know nothing at all

And I will stumble and fall
I’m still learning to love
Just starting to crawl

Say something, I’m giving up on you
I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you
Anywhere, I would’ve followed you
Say something, I’m giving up on you

And I will swallow my pride
You’re the one that I love
And I’m saying goodbye

Say something, I’m giving up on you
And I’m sorry that I couldn’t get to you
And anywhere, I would’ve followed you, oh-oh
Say something, I’m giving up on you

Say something, I’m giving up on you

Grief is an exorcism. If you fight it, you can’t be free of what possesses you. You have to let it pass through you when it comes, even — and especially — when it arrives uninvited. It is a violent thing, caring nothing for context or propriety. I wipe tears from my face with a napkin as I pull in to make the next stop, grateful for once that most of my orders are no-contact deliveries.

The sun is below the horizon now, and the city slips on her evening gown. The contrast between light and shadow grows as the sky shifts through a spectrum of deep colors towards the darkness of night, the scenery bejeweled by a thousand sparkling lights.

There’s a weird kind of built-in nostalgia tour tonight, the orders taking me to places I haven’t been since I first visited Raleigh with my family in 2024. It’s almost as if the universe is grabbing me by the chin and forcing me to look up, and straight into the eyes of the pain I have learned, through necessity, not to observe.

One order takes me to the exact Chick-fil-A we took the kids to on one of the mornings of our first visit. Another brings me to a food hall that was just down the street from our AirBnb — a place I’ve been trying to find for a while now, but couldn’t remember the name of.

I drop a delivery on the dimly-lit porch of a bungalow, the glow of lamplight from within illuminating a window done up entirely in pink roses. I’m not sure if it’s stained glass, or painting, or a combination of the two. Either way, it’s style I’ve never seen.

Another drop-off puts me in the yard of a house with an old, weathered Stingray Corvette in the drive and a sign on the beat up door offering tax services. I can’t tell for sure if it’s been abandoned, but it feels that way.

The sights start to blur together at this point in the night. The cool brick entrance to a bougie bar here. The bright purple glow from an apartment there. A stoplight glowing angrily at an empty intersection as I wait for it to change.

The night wears on. The moon is bright. I try to snap a shot from my car at a red light, but my phone’s automatic selection of a longer exposure means I pick up way too much ambient glow, creating a surreal image, crisscrossed by an absurd number of powerlines, that for some reason I admittedly kind of love.

Moments later, I stop the car and grab a tentative shot of the unusual moon from the parking lot of a Raising Cane’s chicken shop before it rises too high in the sky. There are too many streetlights. I zoom way too far in and do the best I can.

My favorite image of the night, though, comes from a stencil painting on a brick wall, the kind of saying that speaks right to the heart of a man like me:

It’s true, I think. The neck-risking art is the only kind that’s worth a damn.

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