We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. — John Steinbeck

I found a book club! Rather, it found me.

The catalyst was fairy hair. Standing slightly miffed in a roped-off spot ten feet back from the cashiers’ island at J. C. Penney, I barely noticed the petite woman with sparkly threads in her hair who had slipped behind me in line. But my daughter noticed!

It’s called “Fairy hair,” and probably everyone on this planet had seen it except for Helen and me. “That is sooo cool,” Helen exclaimed, and the two of them jumped into an animated conversation about how the sparkles were interwoven and how long they would stay attached.

Stuck in my “miffed-ness,” I was smarting from a gruff rebuke by a glum cashier who told me to move back to the roped-off area to wait my turn. Apparently, this large gap needed to be left open for shoppers walking by . . . except there were no shoppers walking by. And I was the only other purchaser in sight.  Nonetheless, I repositioned myself. The lady with fairy hair was similarly rebuked and thus we found ourselves standing together.

The topic then changed. She garnered that we were new to Winston-Salem. Once we confirmed that (“Yep, moved up from Dallas”), she asked what we missed about Texas.

I stifled my impulse to answer: “I miss everything about Texas!”

Don’t get me wrong. We enjoy Winston-Salem. We like our house and our hilly, forested neighborhood. We adore our new neighbors. Daily I get to drive through an 18th-century Moravian village called Bethania, never failing to wonder at its historical mystique. The regional airport is surprisingly good. It’s easy to get to Trader Joe’s. What’s not to like?

But I still pine for Texas. As she awaited my answer, I intended to spout off something like the Amon Carter Museum or Meyerson Symphony Center, the scrumptious Indian restaurants and necessary-for-life Tex-Mex restaurants, and the intoxicating majesty of Texas’s skies.

Instead, I blurted out: ”I miss my book club.”

I had been in this book club just one year, but it left an impression on me. For starters, it was my first ever book club, unless you count the “Alpha-H Club” my childhood buddy Clare Sue and I started when we were about ten. Alpha-H members focused on two things: pretending our bicycles were horses and reading novels like My Friend Flicka. (“H” stood for “horse”—weren’t we clever?)

But that was it. So, when invited to join a book club in Plano comprised of homeschooling moms united by their kids’ experiences in Classical Conversations, I leapt at the chance.

I took to the club like a duck to water—a thirsty duck at that. These gals did it up right! Monthly meetings were celebrations of books, food, and friendship. I missed that camaraderie.

“Well,” smiled my fairy-haired fellow line-stander, “I belong to a book club here in Winston-Salem. Would you like to come sometime?”

Bingo! Or, to state it more elegantly, “God Works in Mysterious Ways.”

Three weeks later I was knocking on her door, toting Where the Crawdads Sing. It felt like entering into the middle of a movie because these women have shared decades of friendship. But the evening was nice—characterized by an excellent, even contentious, discussion of the book, informative updates on cultural activities in Winston-Salem, and tasty nibbles.

On the plane last night traveling back from Dallas, I began reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America, our next selection for book club. (Yes, they invited me back!) The titular Charley, in case you do not know, was his wife’s standard poodle who served Steinbeck as a point man on his 10,000-mile drive from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back.

I had never read this classic. It’s more engaging than I expected. Many times I have driven across the US, although not quite the way Steinbeck did it in a truck named Rocinante (after Don Quixote’s horse) and outfitted with what, in 1960, would have been a cutting-edge camper top.

Literary scholars and aficionados have applied their lust for post-modern deconstruction to Steinbeck’s journey, debunking it as an accurate travelogue and concluding it to be “merely” a piece of fiction draped over his cross-country drive. They have reveled in pointing out its contradictions (such as Steinbeck staying more often in a comfortable hotel than roughing it in Rocinante). They have proved that much of what Steinbeck wrote is logistically impossible, considering geography and the state of roads at that time.

I’m not bothered by any of this, since truths about our American experience beam from each page. The man was a novelist, for Pete’s sake. Noticeably ill, he was aware that his time on earth was limited. Let him write his final journey however he wished.

Steinbeck’s lines always zap the reader. I reveled in his description of crowding Rocinante with a surplus of items for projects he intended to complete along the way.

I suppose our capacity for self-delusion is boundless.

Intending to chronicle his journey (hence his cargo of typewriter and reams of paper), he also intended to read along the way, so he took the “hundred-and-fifty pounds of those books one hasn’t gotten around to reading” that, he admits, are “books one isn’t ever going to get around to reading.”

Throughout Travels with Charley, Steinbeck descries the urbanization, depersonalization, and increased uniformity of society that threatened traditional rural life. But he also projects that

. . . as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside. This prophecy is underwritten by the tendency of the rich to do this already. Where the rich lead, the poor will follow, or try to.

Was he right? Right now wealth and technology seem to be leading us as a society even further away from our roots and our traditions.

Insofar as depersonalization? Steinbeck feared that one day we would drive from sea-to-shining sea on polished highways that permit us to see little of our beautiful America. He also observed, based on experiencing 1960s truck stops, that we were destined to nourish ourselves with perfect-looking, plastic-covered foods utterly without taste.

How would he react to seeing us today, crammed into airplanes, shaking off the stress of zombie-like passage through airport security, re-dressing ourselves awkwardly and reassembling our personal dignity for the long walk to our gates? How might he describe wobbling around in turbulence in a miniature seat on Row 42, wanting to be polite to our equally compressed seatmate while quietly fighting for every square centimeter of space we can have? Food under plastic? How about an airplane meal?

Still, he’s also right that we, as Americans have, and always will have, travel in our blood. And he certainly knew the transformative power of travel.

We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.

I’ll easily finish the book before Monday night’s meeting. A humorous text came to me warning me that the gals expect me to interpret Steinbeck’s “Texas” section, which begins

When I started this narrative, I knew that sooner or later I would have to have a go at Texas, and I dreaded it.

I will tell them that, according to my lady friend from Midland, Texas, you have to live forty years in Texas (which I didn’t quite make) in order to speak as a Texan! Hopefully they will laugh, and then I will proceed to sing Texas’ praises.

I’m grateful for book clubs. I’m grateful for fairy hair or any other sparkly thing that starts a conversation. I hope that glum cashier has a chance to journey across our extraordinary land, for I sensed she had seen little beyond her immediate horizon.

And may your own trips, real or imagined, be filled with fancies born in your heart, fueled by the beauty around you and sustained by the kind of optimism that causes us, time and time again, to pack those hundred-and-fifty pounds of books.