Redemption

In the pre-dawn ink of the Detroit Metro Region I found myself on a major thoroughfare, moving with deliberate speed in the rental car, peering out, hoping for the dawn to cut the gloom and allow a decent speed of advance toward the Imperial City 560 miles away.

I saw headlights coming up behind me and I cleared the left hand lane to let him by- had to be a man, I thought, this was crazy fast. I looked at the instrument cluster. I was doing the posted limit for a change, but this car was a rocket. There was actually a buffet in the air as the dark Buick hurtled by, the nearness of the two moving bodies creating a Venturi vortex at the point of closest proximity.

“Son of a bitch!” I breathed as I watched the ruby taillights disappear into the distance. He must have been doing a hundred- and I realized with the City of Detroit sinking into receivership, there were no cops watching and the Metro area was sinking into a lawless anarchy of hard men moving at enormous speeds for purposes known only to themselves.

Kerouac, right? “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” Fast.

The miles between the madness of a city in the grip of its death-rattle and the frenetic ADD vehicular activity of the Imperial City had been gentle enough. Traffic was not bad, and the great blessing of splitting the seam between storm fronts.

There were some soupy moments in the highlands and along the vast salt-gray winter turnpikes, but it was done.

The phone continued to go off beside me on the journey, interrupting the stream of news-from-around-the-world that poured majestically out of the SiriusXM radio channel that featured national news coverage from Ireland, Sweden, Romania, New Zealand and Radio Moscow.

It was quite engaging- Samoa is skipping today to join the nations on the other side of the Date Line, I loved the way the Russians treated the pro-democracy demonstrations in perky English, and relayed an important survey from the Foreign Ministry that accused the United States of being a major locus of Human Rights abuses. It was more than a little like listening to Radio Mars, not that there was not enough to agree with.

In between, the new renter reported the hot water was out in the annex, and that required coordination with Ballard’s Plumbing somewhere north of Toledo. In the outskirts of Cleveland, the laundry staff of The Bluffs called to let me know that they had laundered Raven’s sneakers and they had disintegrated. What were they to do?

“I am at mile marker 124 on the Ohio Turnpike and am not turning around,” I said tersely, and on-the-fly suggested a plan by which a replacement pair of shoes could wend their way around the Bay and on to Raven’s feet.

That, in turn, led my thoughts to my last sight of him, a kiss on the forehead, and the miles between. And the devastating moment when I said goodbye to Big Mama, realizing that there would only be meals for her with the other space-time-continuum-challenged oldsters in the Dining Room and the endless Turner Classic Movies. I need to rethink this. There had not been time when Raven got the boot from the Village. She has not seen him since then, and has expressed no interest, but there is a yawning cavity in her life.

Approaching the I270 High Tech corridor some bonehead in a late model Dodge not unlike the one I was driving had challenged the mass and inertia of a big Kenworth Tractor Trailer and lost.

I was close enough to the Capital to get the local traffic reports Live on the Lights, and I switched from satellite to FM and dialed it up. Some guy was doing a year-end summary of the financial markets, something to which I had paid exactly zero interest in the context of the folks, the coming hot war with Iran and whether my son would wind up with the task force that will force open the Strait of Hormuz if those idiots miscalculate.

Now or later, I suppose. The Israelis will never permit them to get The Bomb, regardless of what the Administration desires.

The money wonk was explaining what was happening. I had dumped some additional money into my 401K as the year was ending, but saw that despite my additions, the net value was dropping.

It was actually news I could use: “…To date,” the wonk opined “and with just one week left in the year, investors have withdrawn a whopping $135 billion from equity mutual funds, which I am 100% certain is an all time record for any year in which the S&P closed even nominally positive for the year…”

Crap, I thought, changing lanes to get around a dude on his cell phone in a silver BMW. It appears the big institutional  investors are cashing out of mutual funds – redeeming their stake.  The fund managers in turn have to sell assets  in order to get cash to cover the payouts, and that means gold and silver.

The guy on the radio said the process was called “redemption,” and I looked blankly out through the salt-crusted windshield at the long snake of red taillights ahead, grateful that I could just give it back to the Hertz people just as it was.

Redemption. A curious term that rattled around in my brain to conjure the memory of Green Stamps and booklets filled with them. Redemption Centers is what they called them, places where you could get free stuff in exchange for collecting the stamps.

Now it is about swapping the paper Mr. Bernanke is printing at the Fed, and it is easy enough to forget that there is also the state of redemption, the deliverance from sin and salvation of the soul.

I was coming back to the wrong city to look for anything like that, but I decided I might go short on my mutuals if I could dig out from the road.

That is as close to redemption as I am likely to get this year. I am hoping 2012 is going to be better. Another definition of the term is “deliverance,” as if from evil, but who knows. I am not going to bet the farm on that.

I thought if I ever got south of Rockville and across the Potomac I would go straight to Willow and redeem some Happy Hour White.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com