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To Columbus, and Beyond!!!

A 3 day weekend is a beautiful thing, rare, and not to be wasted. A four day weekend is even better, and this is what I had with the beginning of July. Having made up my mind to go see my father in Columbus, I took Friday off and decided to take the long drive to Ohio.
I left town around 8 in the morning, hoping to cover the 420 miles in no more than seven hours. Traffic was minimal as the holiday weekend was beginning, and I managed to avoid both ends of the traditional rush hour. Feeling comfortable about the drive, I stopped 250 miles into the voyage to refuel in the small city of Washington, PA. That was my only stop before reaching Columbus, which is not very healthy, since it's recommended that for every hour of driving you take at least five minutes to stretch the limbs, but nonetheless I made it to Columbus by 2:15 in the afternoon.
I intended to visit an office my company has in Columbus, but I had no idea where it was, so I stopped at the gorgeous central library in downtown Columbus. I also wanted to let a few selected people know that I'd arrived safely, so while I surfed the net in the library I made sure to email said selected people. I found the address of the office in question and set out for it, having good relations with most of the people who worked there. I thought it would be simple.
According to my research, that office was right in my father's neighborhood. However, when I went to the location I'd found on Mapquest, I nearly drove into the Olentangy river, which winds from north to south through the capital of Ohio. After an abortive attempt to find the office, I gave up and stopped at a nearby Kroger for some Gatorade to refresh myself, and a pay phone to alert my father to my arrival. I'd arrived ahead of schedule in order to maximize the time I could spend.
He was indeed very surprised to find that I was in town. I'd told him that I was across the river, and when he found out that it was the Olentangy to which I'd referred, he was thrilled, if a bit surprised.
This was my first visit to Columbus since January of 2000, other potential trips having been scrapped at the last minute, either by his wishes or my own situation. Since I had been contacted in the past concerning some of my unflattering remarks about that city, I decided to look upon it with fresh and unbiased eyes. As it turned out, my stay would be more brief than anyone had anticipated. I won't go into why, but I spend just over a day in town and, as such, had little time to explore some of the tourist attractions I'd been advised of by an anonymous contact.
After nearly killing four separate people cutting through back alleys to get to my father's place, I found him outside waiting for me. He'd warned me that he had a few more cats than the last time I'd seen him, when he had three. I like cats, so I figured I could take a few pictures of them at the very least.
He was right.
I don't have a firm count of the number of cats, but there were more than three. Oddly enough, one of them was among the original three, named Chip for his onetime penchant for perching on peoples' shoulders, which I'd known in Baltimore, but I saw him only briefly. He was the elder statesman, having reached an august age of 13 years old, quite respectable for a cat, although he was by no means senescent.
The rest of the cats ranged in age from about three weeks old to a year, although there was the aforementioned Chip, as well as a six year old named Sophie. There was a veritable rainbow of felines, from those as white as snow (like this adorable kitten), to some really young kittens who were all black. Most of them (pictured here) were greyish tabbies. I didn't catch all of their names, although my father admitted that he and his de facto wife had started naming them by their color and quality of their fur.
At any rate, there were many cats.
We spent most of the time in discussion, catching up on each other's lives, and discussing almost everything else under the sun, from the decline of civilization as we knew it, to his newfound form of artistic expression. I read some poems he'd written, which were pretty decent, and saw a number of portraits he'd done in various media, from charcoal to paint to pastel. Oddly enough, despite the fact he'd shown little or no proficiency for the visual arts, his stuff was pretty good. I was impressed.
The character of the visit had been well established by this time, departing from a tourist expedition to one more personal, which was just as well. We dined on Chinese food from a local buffet, and I was amused watching him trying to eat some steamed crawfish which appeared to have crawled straight out of Hell itself. I slept for a couple hours and woke up with the sun as is my wont. Since neither of my hosts were early risers, I left the house and went on a walk around the neighborhood.
They live in a pretty nice neighborhood, with lots of well kept houses and a disproportionately large number of political banners, from outright support of Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry to outrage against the war in Iraq. I also saw a number of placards advertising some sort of Immaculate Conception festival scheduled for the end of the month, which contrasted weirdly with the secular slant of most of the advertisements in the neighborhood.
There were a number of places I wanted to visit, but as it turned out I only saw one or two. One of the was The Laughing Ogre, which is quite possibly the best comic book store I have ever seen. Well worth the fifty bucks I spent there, I'm quite willing to give them any free publicity I can give.
I did find something quite unusual and potentially disturbing: a comic book rendition of Adolf Hitler's life. Even after reading it, I'm not sure what the intent behind the comic book is supposed to be, whether it's meant to glorify his life, or humanize a character who has been traditionally demonized in the pages of history. The comic presented the story as is without any discernible slant one way or the other, but I'm still not sure whether I did the right thing in purchasing it.
The next character in the series (Dictators of the 20th Century) will be Saddam Hussein. One wonders whether Mao Tse Tung, Josef Stalin, or Pol Pot will follow in short order. Interesting material, though, and since I have an interest in it I guess in the end it was the right thing to do. I still feel unclean, though.
By noon or so I'd firmly decided to leave town in the evening, again for reasons I will not uncover here. I managed to get some quality time with dear old dad, encouraging him to take a walk with me along the course of the Olentangy river. I saw a number of things on the walk which deserved immortalization.

We stopped into an ice cream shop for a couple milkshakes, although considering the extreme heat something less substantive may have been better.
I also wanted to visit some very nice people I knew who lived in the suburbs of Columbus, parents of my father's wife, with whom I'd lost touch over the last four and a half years. They have four cats of their own, two ocicats (Clio and Annie), and two American shorthairs (Bo and Quincy), who are pretty cool in their own right. I spent about three hours there, catching up and committing to restore broken lines of communication. Time was pressing, though, and at last I had to leave.
A freak hurricane hit Columbus for about five minutes on my return to my father's house, which I'd decided would be short and to the point, as I was not feeling very spry and wanted to return to my own bed. He was disappointed that I was leaving so soon, as was I, but, again, there were reasons for it. I'd like to see him more than once every two years or so, and perhaps I will go out again later this year (Labor Day), perhaps not. Who knows...
The trip back to Baltimore went without incident, although a side effect of traveling at night on the weekend of July 4th was that I caught a number of fireworks displays in transit. There's nothing quite as wild as seeing massive explosions as you're driving down the highway at 75 mph. It gives the drive a character of taking place during Armageddon, which is always a good thing. I went about four hours into the journey until my first break, in the super truck stop which is Breezewood PA, which has somehow earned a soft spot in my cold heart. I'd left Columbus around 7pm, and I was in Breezewood by 11:30. I took about 15 minutes there, between refueling and just stretching my limbs.
In the end, I was back at my humble dungeon just before 1:30...when I almost immediately fell into a long and curative sleep.
And that, as they say, is that.

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Cats are inherently cool creatures...aloof, furry, and oh so deadly.

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