Not sure when I hatched the plan.

Was it when my husband came home from his doctor’s appointment at 10:30 one morning and found me in bed reading?  “I see you haven’t made it out of bed yet,” he said.

Was it when he lay in bed, conversing with Siri in that slow, deliberate way he does with foreigners?  “Hey, Siri.  How.  Old.  Is.  Bob. Newhart?”

Maybe it was when we spent 20 minutes debating about which Netflix show we wanted to binge next.

Or when he wanted to walk one block with me to Ace Hardware.

Oh, and the afternoon when I was oh-so-busy catching up on Facebook, and he kept feeding me research studies because, he said, “I know you love statistics.”

Or how he says, every damn day, “Your daily Amazon delivery is here.”

There were a series of perfectly normal, non-hostile domestic interactions that week that just drove me around the bend. We’d been quarantining together, apart from the world, for 4 months, 12 days, and 3 hours.  Our apartment was getting small.

So late one night, I searched the Internet for hotels in nearby cities for a solo vacation.

The next day, I harangued my husband about his hair (too long), shirt (too big), posture (too stooped), and that whispering thing he does when he talks to himself.  I thought he would be as glad that I left as I would be to leave.

That night, I walked into the living room and interrupted my husband whispering to himself about I-don’t-know-what.  “I have to get away,” I said.

I was alarmed to see the hopeful look on his face, like a dog whose owner just said, “You want to go for a walk?”

I clarified: “Alone.  I have to get away alone.” Then to soften the blow, I channeled George Costanza of Seinfeld fame: “It’s not you, it’s me.”  And that was the absolute truth.

The next day, I threw some sweatpants, a couple random shirts, and underwear in a bag (as in a grocery bag).  I later discovered I had forgotten to pack bras, which was emblematic of the freedom I was seeking.

So I wouldn’t have to go to restaurants (It’s a Covid thing), I packed all the food I’d need for my 40 hour adventure, but drove away without it.  Thank goodness I remembered my adult beverage:  Coke Zero.

I set out for my drive an hour north to the thriving metropolis of Oxford, Ohio, home of Miami University, my alma  mater, for a wild two-night getaway.

I transferred to Miami’s school of education from the University of Evansville’s drama department in the middle of my sophomore year.  No matter what I told my parents, the move was intended to get me closer to home and my fiancé, now my husband of 48 years.  Now I was going to Oxford to get farther away from him.

When I checked into the Hampton Inn on College Avenue, the masked desk clerk informed me there would be no pool, no spa, and no breakfast due to Covid.  “Yes, I understand,” I said.  “Please make a note that I won’t need housekeeping on my second day.”  I had done my homework and knew you didn’t want a virus-breathing housekeeper in your room.

“Oh, we don’t do housekeeping while you’re here.  You know . . .”

“Yeah, Covid.”  And suddenly I was pissed that I was not getting the housekeeping that I had just said I didn’t want.

I reflected on the spoiled woman I was, whose every material need was met at home, paying $139 a night for a room that offered fewer amenities than her apartment because she wanted to be alone. I was the poster child for privilege.

I hadn’t lost my livelihood.  I hadn’t lost a loved one.  I wasn’t an “essential worker” who had to go each day into harm’s way. I had only lost my solitude, my autonomy.  In the scheme of things, it was a small loss, and I reflected on my good fortune as I walked to my room.

My room was on the first floor, just a few steps away from the INaction:  empty lobby, closed dining room, darkened gym, locked pool. There was a king-sized bed, a TV, a refrigerator, and a microwave.  AND a TV remote (that was mine-oh-mine) and a thermostat (that was more thrilling than a sex toy).

I plumped up the pillows on the side of the bed closest to the bathroom, normally “his” side, and had my way with the TV remote.  I sipped a chilled Diet Coke and cycled through my iphone apps.  At 6:00, I drove three minutes to Kroger to get a frozen meal to nuke in my room.  Then more time with the Holy Trinity:  Email/Facebook/Scrabble.

Maybe I forgot to brush my teeth before going to sleep very late—it was probably 11:30 or so, because I was living on the edge.  Squeezing all the joy from every minute.

The next morning I got a drive-through Egg McMuffin, and after eating it in my room, tied on my Skechers sneakers, popped in my earphones, and headed for town.  I half-listened to my audiobook, Working Stiff, a coroner’s memoir, as I passed perfectly ordinary houses, mostly one-story cottages, many “For Rent” for college students.

Some houses were “named”:  “Duck Duck Booze,” “Melee,” “Penalty Box.” Perhaps this was a nod to the forties’ style of named buildings like “The Roanoke,” “The Hereford,” and the “Hosea” near the UC campus, but “Legally Blond,” has a different ring to it.

I passed by the street where my brother lived in a white two-story with a bunch of guys for a while, but I couldn’t find it.  I remembered him stepping out of the front window instead of the door to greet me.

I made my way uptown, the main (only) business district of Oxford.  It is a glammed up version of the shabby town we walked to in the 70s for our 3-2 beer, but there was enough recognizable that memories began to emerge.

There was that little movie theater where my roommate Polly and I brought in a jar of pickles (or was it olives?) for our snack.  (Oh, how wonderful it would be to consume that much sodium without a thought of hypertension.)  But now the movie theater is a music venue. And whatever happened to Polly?

There was the place that used to be a stop for the Greyhound bus that took me to College Hill where my parents picked me up. I’d go home for weekends to bake cookies to send my fiancé at Ft. Dix. It was only after a few years of marriage to Rick that I learned that he sold most of those cookies to other recruits. (He should have bought me a bigger diamond with his ill-gotten gains.)

This was the university president’s home.

William McGuffey, author of the McGuffey Readers, was an MU professor in 1827.

A historical building–from 1964!

The Police Station, that looks like it came from the Desperate Housewives set, is still there. What was it like for the town constables and the campus police when students protested against the Vietnam War in 1970.  My brother was tear-gassed right on campus.

There was the water tower, a common meeting place before bar-hopping, and many Protestant churches, none of which I ever attended.

Now there are a couple vape shops and a cigar store, which didn’t exist back in the day.  I don’t remember where I bought my Tareyton Lights that I smoked in big lecture halls. (I had a hippie girlfriend who smoked a pipe in class.)  Is it possible there was a ciggie vending machine in my dorm?

It took 10 minutes for me to walk through town to the campus.  I passed by the King Library steps, where students once sat and openly smoked pot.  I was more restrained, inhaling my weed clandestinely in woods and fraternity houses.

I passed by the parking lot where my first dorm, Tallawanda, once was.  In the basement of that dorm was Tuffy’s, a little restaurant made famous by cinnamon rolls in a time before Cinnabon. Ogden Hall was across the street. It was my second and final Miami dorm before getting married.

I looked for a particular building –I think it was Upham Hall—that had an arched walkway through the center, but I couldn’t locate it in the clutch academic buildings.  There was a legend that if you got kissed under that arch, you would get married . . . or lose your virginity. . . or pledge your first-choice sorority.  I don’t remember the particulars, because all those ships had sailed by the time I had a class there as a married woman.

As I continued through the campus of almost identical red brick buildings, I grew melancholy, not because of all I remembered, but because my memories of college were so meager.  There was so little about my undergraduate experience that changed me.  I attended classes at Miami, touted as a “Public Ivy,” with students who were, like the buildings, alike:  white, middle-class, well-educated. It was where I learned how to teach students like me.

When I walked to the edge of campus, I spotted the parking lot where, in my junior and senior years, I often parked our chartreuse Maverick.  Each morning I’d drop my husband off to teach math at Colerain Junior High School, then fly up 27, swing into the parking place by Cook Field, and run to my first class.  At the end of my classes, I’d run back to the car, and speed down 27 in time to pick my husband up.  Those years are a blur.

After graduating, though, I came back to Miami.  I parked in that same lot when attending the Ohio Writing Project (OWP) at Bachelor Hall in the summers of 1993-1996.  That graduate work launched me as a writer, and I am quite sure I wouldn’t be writing this blog without it.  And unlike my undergraduate experience, OWP changed me as a teacher and a human being in fundamental ways.  It was the first time my understanding of justice, diversity, and equality were challenged.

And I came back again in 1998 to take night classes with Dr. Tom Romano, author of many books on teaching writing.

And here I was.  Back again.

Maybe because I was consumed with my memories, or maybe because I could lose my way in a walk-in closet, I got a little lost heading back to my hotel.  I wish I could tell you that I walked too far North or West, but I only speak Right and Left.  When I called my husband that night, I only mentioned that I had walked 7 miles that day, not that 2 miles of it were backtracking to get to the Hampton Inn.

I didn’t tell him, either, how invisible I felt walking in this white enclave, how nobody noticed me or eyed me with suspicion.  Or that the signs I saw were chirpy “Kindness is Contagious,” not “Black Lives Matter.”

I didn’t tell him how I was keenly aware and grateful for my healthy body, how I worshipped my strong legs as they carried me mile after mile.  Or that I thought about my mortality, how I was lucky to have this full and privileged life, and if there was little more of it due to this heinous virus, I was still lucky.

I didn’t tell him how much I miss holding my granddaughters. (It’s a Covid thing.)  How I have a big black void inside of me that should be filled with their sweetness, and that there is nothing, nothing he can do to fill that longing.  It would make him sad and a little desperate, because he always tries to fill me up.

I didn’t tell him that I did learn something at Miami University that day, that I had found myself by getting lost.

My thoughts were my own.  They weren’t diluted or disrupted or derailed or distilled by another human’s thoughts.

I didn’t have to make the best of things, be peppy, “give it the old college try” even at my college.

Check out was at noon.  I told Rick I wouldn’t leave a minute before.  He said, “Be careful,” like he did the hundreds of times I had driven home from Oxford before.

I drove past the same corn and soybean fields.  Past that big red brick house where I once got a flat tire. That little elementary school where I fantasized I might teach. Past the place that used to be a restaurant with a big organ.  And like all those times, when I reached McGonigle, the pull toward Cincinnati was stronger than my pull to Oxford.

I was going home.

There was an Amazon delivery waiting.  A book on my side of the bed.  A whispering, statistic-wielding, kind husband who would be ready to listen to whatever I was ready to share.

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My husband travels without me.  It’s all good.