Do you remember the words from that old song, Leaving on a Jet Plane?  It’s an old Peter, Paul, and Mary number sung by someone who has to go off on tour, leaving loved ones back home.  It doesn’t matter what kind of tour it is—military tour of duty, book tour, touring musicians, or just someone who has to travel for work—it’s always tough when you have to pack your bags and head off to faraway places when the one who means the most to you in all the world is left behind at home.

Since Bill re-injured his back several years ago—complicating an injury that was already fifty or so years old—that has been our situation.  When it came time to go on book tour, I went and he stayed home.  He may have been at home in a familiar, comforting place, with a loyal dog or dogs for company, but it wasn’t a time of carefree kicking back and dozing out on the patio.  It was a time of eating alone and sleeping alone, something neither of us signed on for.

In the meantime, I was out on the road, doing two or three presentations a day—and gaining energy and emotional charges from my audiences’ reactions, but once the adrenaline faded?  So did I.  And when I’d return to the hotel, I’d be a goner, but could I sleep?  Generally not until the wee hours of the morning, regardless of time zone.

Doing the performances AND driving my own cars was clearly not recommended, so for the past several years either my son or my daughter-in-law have stepped up to “drive Miss Daisy” on tour.  I had them to make the Garmin work and to trouble-shoots problems with venues like missing microphones or semi-stalker fans.  Let’s just say that, for women of a certain age, being on tour all by your lonesome is NOT a good idea.

Over time, as Bill’s back got worse and worse, and we BOTH became more and more sedentary, which is why our starting to do our “step program” a year ago in April was so important.  At first Bill could only manage a max of 2000 steps a day, resting every two hundred steps or so, and using a cane to help maintain his balance as he shuffled along like a little old guy.  It would be specious to say that his back pain has magically disappeared. It has not, but he has learned to manage it.  With the help of a trainer, his muscle structure has improved enough so he can support his back better, and that, in turn, lessens the pain.  Being sixty-plus pounds lighter also makes a huge difference in the back pain department.  These days, he’s still a “little old guy,” but when he steps out, he strides off as though he means it—without a cane in sight.

Last year he was depressed, and he was all about figuring out how I’d get along without him.  All I can say is, “What a difference a year makes!”

This year he’s on tour with me.  He understands the things that drive me nuts, and after thirty-plus years of marriage, he has some well-honed strategies for talking me down from my tree.  The tour is as grueling as ever … well, wait, maybe not quite as grueling—only one or two events a day so far rather than three.  But between events, we’re in the car together saying, remember when:  Remember when we went to the B. Dalton’s off that exit?  Remember when that piece of tire flew up from a passing truck and slammed into the front end of the car?  Remember when we stopped at that long dead restaurant for lunch, and isn’t that the Denny’s where the DEA took down a bunch of drug dealers in the parking lot while we were having dinner?

It’s wonderful to be on the road sharing close to a lifetime’s worth of “remember whens” back and forth across the front seat and listening to familiar music on our favorite Serius channel, Escape.  They only play orchestral arrangements of songs, but that doesn’t matter a bit, at least not to us, because we happen to know most of the words, anyway.  And if we do forget some of the lyrics?  No problem, we can always Google the song on our iPhone.

This year we arrived in Phoenix on Sunday night only to discover that our favorite hotel had been “reimagined” and remodeled by some hip person who has no concept that when you’re on tour what you really want is something old school and familiar.  Maybe I’m only speaking for myself here—maybe there are plenty of people who want to go into the bathroom first thing in the morning and find a painting of a shark hanging on a clothes pin over the toilet. It just happens that I am NOT one of those people.

After a single night, we removed ourselves from that once-beloved and now “too hip” hotel to one that is … well … relatively frumpy by comparison, but one with comfortable seating for more than one person in the room; one where the bath mats don’t have the admonishing words, “clean up your act” printed on them; one where a room service meal comes on an actual tray rather than in a paper bag!  (As I checked out of the hipster hotel in high dudgeon on Monday morning rather than staying the remaining three nights, I was assured that I could have had a plate with room service if I had wanted one.  You know what?  I assumed that plates came with room service food automatically without my having to make a special request.

But here’s the best part, Bill and I are together on this adventure.  I wasn’t calling him from the hotel, whining because things weren’t to my liking when there wasn’t a single thing he could do from back home to fix whatever was the matter.  We left the hotel, we found a place that wasn’t black-hole dining to have a good breakfast, and then we sat in a comfortable lobby elsewhere until it was time to check into the new hotel, where, I might add, I’m sleeping like a baby.

That’s what our year of playing what our grandson, Colt, likes to call the “step game” together has done for us. It’s made Bill well enough to come drive Miss Daisy on the Clawback tour.  It has given us this time and these many adventures together—good, bad, or indifferent.  

Sort of like marriage where it says, “for better or for worse.”

This is definitely for better.