It is a fortunate thing (a God thing, my husband would say) that I have no money to rent a car on my trip home this week. In my rental carless state, I'm relying on friends to chauffeur me, and the first and only people who volunteered for the job of navigating the traffic to and from the airport are the two people in all the world I most love to drive with: my friends Jess and Pat. My trip will be bookended by rides with each of them; Jess has agreed to pick up whatever pieces of me arrive sanely at my destination this week, and when I finish my trip, and it's time to face the plane again for the return journey, Pat will be driving me back to the airport.

It's surprisingly hard for me to write about driving with Pat. I've been writing and deleting for over an hour now, with just the first paragraph to show for it. Writing about Jess was easy. Each of my drives with her has blurred into the next; there are no specific memories, just the constant defining image of her hands on drumming the steering wheel and shifting gears. I've driven with Pat countless times, but a few memories stand out so distinctly and clearly that it's hard to knit them into one post. It felt less like creating a narrative than looking through a photo album and commenting on each picture. So, I've given up.

I don't know whether this ride to the airport will become one of those dearly worn and dogeared pages in my memories of that friendship, but I do know that it comforts me to know that he, of all people, will be seeing me onto the plane. The last time I saw him (five years ago it must be now), I stood outside his house, at the open door of my rental car, saying goodbye. I don't know if I said I was nervous about the flight home the next day, or if, knowing me so well and for so long, he knew without me saying it. But he said, "Hey, you. Don't worry about the flight. You'll be fine." As he said it, he pushed the palm of his hand gently, playfully, into my forehead: something between smacking and anointing me. In the morning, when I boarded the plane, I could feel a hand still on my forehead, letting me know I was going to be fine.