Seeing the road through my wife's eyes

A Hyundai climbs a hill
Photographer: Debbie Levy
Atlanta, GA
January 2018
This photo originally shared on Instagram

This is one of the few photos in my feed that I did not take. My lovely wife, Debbie, did, on the I-75 northbound in the Atlanta core, a high-speed, no-nonsense stretch peppered with relentless curves, onramps and offramps. Lane discipline was, uh, invisible, and I was pretty stressed, so I cranked the GPS volume up and leaned heavily on my navigator - again, my lovely wife - to get us through the gauntlet as I counted down the kilometres until we were back to a normal three-lane highway.

That's how we roll in Levyland: As a team. On long trips, I'll do most of the driving, and she does everything else to keep us focused, like talking me through busy stretches and finding little ways to make the rest of the journey feel less draggy, more homey. She's a godsend, and it makes road trips, if not shorter, then way more fun and memorable.

One thing I realized as I scanned our photo logs from past trips was we didn't have much of a record of the drive itself. I was so busy at the wheel that pictures of the stuff we saw along the way didn't get taken. So she started shooting with her smartphone, always seeming to guess exactly what I might have zeroed in on had I been the one at the shutter. She's a pretty good mind-reader, too.

This is a textbook composition, the road climbing as it curved between old Olympic sites and construction sites. The Hyundai SUV seemed to mirror ours, an average vehicle filled with average folks just trying to get home safely. Meanwhile back in our lane, while my eyes were laser-focused on keeping us out of trouble, Debbie was busy telling the story of our trip home, another chapter in a life we wouldn't trade for anything.

This isn't some huge moment or huge story. But it's ours, and we've added it to the ever growing pile of small moments that make our family story worth recording. Because if we don't find some way to remember the journey, who will do it for us? Indeed, we all tell our own stories, and I've got a pretty amazing storyteller beside me.

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