Ed. — Archived from the Sunday, Aug. 11, print edition.
VIRGINIA BEACH — I’m a creature of habit and ritual. I don’t often stray from a beaten path I’ve worked hard to create. This applies to all I do, from how I go about my day (at breakneck speed) to how I get around town (the fastest way).
Lately, this has changed. Instead of following the tried and true, I’ve been taking the scenic route through life, and not because it’s shorter or easier. I’ve been taking this path because it’s less traveled, and that, the poet Robert Frost would say, has made all the difference.
Throughout my adolescence, my father lamented how similar we were in what he called our Type A personalities. Whenever I’d moan about how little free time I had or complain about having to wait for something I wanted in my personal or professional life, he’d say, “That’s your father in you, Pumpkin. You need to practice patience and slow down.”
This was odd advice from a man whose Type A life had imprinted on me in a myriad of ways. I’d learned that, although food was enjoyable, meals were purely functional, eaten quickly and often while standing. Office days started early, were always long and work came home with you. If getting ahead mattered, the toil continued through the weekend with housework, yardwork and more work.
The only time extravagance my father enjoyed was the beer and bowl of in-the-shell peanuts he had each night after the last essay had been reviewed. I modeled my life accordingly, right down to becoming a tireless academic like my dad.
Then the pandemic hit, and my father died. I left academia, and we downsized our home. I started taking a left on New Bridge Road and a right on Indian River to get to the city’s busier areas — though I could get to those places along quicker paths.
But along this more rural route, my world quiets. In the lushness of summer, the lanes I ride are filled with so much green that I feel humbled by the abundance. If I’m behind someone driving under the speed limit, which occurs often, I remind myself that there’s nothing I can do but enjoy the view of the farmstands I pass and the open but working farm fields stretching to the woods on the horizon.
These roads I travel remain two lanes, mostly uncongested byways, because this area I travel is still primarily agricultural. They could use some tender loving care, although there are ongoing improvements. But they roll and bend with the farm fields they traverse and must be taken at a slower, more relaxed pace.
Occasionally, when I return in this direction in the evening, I’ll see deer along the woods, white and blue herons standing in the waterways and ditches or geese flying so leisurely overhead they appear almost immobile in the slowly darkening sky.
I witness all this because I take these roads when others go on to the crowded multilane intersections up ahead.
Sometimes I think, “I’ll make better time if I follow along.”
But then I remember my father’s example.
He eventually broke away from his Type A life to settle in the mountains of West Virginia and explore roads previously unknown.
His late-in-life choices taught me that stepping out of line and off the beaten path changes everything. It encourages transformations of habit and perspectives.
This can lead, as it has for me, as it did for my father, to something completely novel and as simple as a meal at a table by a window where hummingbirds come and go and come and go and come and go.
The author is a former Virginia Beach Planning Commissioner and college professor. Reach her at leejogger@gmail.com.
