Packing...is lame.

Eighteen hours to go.

I have a dozen different lists, scrawled across the back of envelopes, medical mycology notes, on my window in dry erase markers. Every time I try to pack something, I remember five other things I think I should bring and then it’s back to the list, revising what I can actually use in a week.
I went to overnight camp for what felt like my entire childhood, but I’ve still never learned how to pack. It gets harder, I think, as we grow up and start taking in practical considerations like sunscreen and batteries, instead of just concentrating on cramming as much contraband candy as possible into a suitcase. (Though, admittedly, pound-for-pound, I’m still aiming to have more gummy worms than clothes.)

This is going to be one heck of a bus ride.
My last long trip was…four years ago (WOW, I’m getting old), when my mother, a saint the more I consider her, drove my younger sisters and I from St. Catherines all the way to Lower Manhattan, in nine solid hours (including the time we spent trying to navigate the Tappan Zee bridge). Earlier that year, our band trip to Chicago was twelve hours of Blues Brothers-watching, pillow-fighting, Cheetos-eating, musicals-singing confinement on a too-hot bus that I wouldn’t trade for anything. Don't tell, but I secretly love long bus trips.

As soon as I brought up New Orleans at Thanksgiving, I watched the shadow of a hundred different microorganisms cross my mother’s face. Cholera, typhoid, dysentery, shigellosis…
“Mama, please. It’s not a third world country,” I said, though I regretted it immediately. My mother reads the same newspapers I do. She remembered the reports from BBC and CNN coming in in the days following the hurricane, describing New Orleans as just that—a third world country inside the most powerful nation in the world.
She has settled down since then and opted instead for sending me drugs in the mail (in her defense, she is a pharmacist)—gentian violet, ciprofloxacin, furosemide, oral rehydration salts, loperamide, cetirizine.
This is not helping me decide what to bring.

I’ve been industriously cramming music onto my iPod all day. According to iTunes, I have 3.6 days worth of music. I firmly believe that there is a perfect song for every experience, every moment, and that some of our greatest happiness comes from the breathless synergy we get when we find that song.
I wonder what it will be for New Orleans.