Illustration: Jonny Glover/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Illustration: Jonny Glover/The Guardian David Sedaris David Sedaris on his Duolingo obsession: ‘“Today is the last day,” I told myself – but I was powerless to stop’ I decided to combine my need to top the leader table with my daily step count – which is how I found myself walking 10 miles a day while reading out sentences in Japanese, German, Spanish and French
Prefer the Guardian on Google Hugh and I were driving from Washington, DC, to the Sea Section, our house on the coast of North Carolina, when I noticed a dot with legs traversing the hem of my untucked shirt. “There’s a tick on me!” I said.
He looked down at my lap. “Well, throw it outside. It’s nothing to get hysterical about.”
“I’m not ‘hysterical’,” I told him. “I just didn’t expect to find a tick in a rental car, is all.”
We had a long drive ahead of us, and this seemed like a bad way to start out. That said, at least it wasn’t a Lyme disease tick. It was too big. “I bet it fell off someone’s dog,” I said, examining it in the palm of my hand before tossing it out the window. “It smells like it’s full of rescue blood.”
“You blame everything on dogs,” Hugh reminded me.
That was when we hit an hour-long traffic jam.
“Really?” I said as we came to a full stop. “But it’s Sunday!”
In the end, it took almost eight hours to reach Emerald Isle. The digital car radio was stuck on a 70s station, so when something terrible came on we’d hit the off button for three to four minutes. The trick was mutually agreeing on what was terrible. “But that’s Abba!” Hugh cried more than once, swatting away my hand as I reached toward the dash.
In New Hampshire, I’d come upon ‘No Kings!’ protesters. It pained me to admit it, but they looked like kooks, like Tea Party demonstrators during Obama’s first term We stopped twice, once at a wooded rest area where we walked half a mile in the unspeakable July heat, and then at Bojangles, where we sat beside a man who ate biscuits and red beans while talking on his phone to someone named Crockett. All the other customers were teenage baseball players with mullets.
“God Bless President Trump” read a number of handpainted banners we passed after entering North Carolina. Funny was how unnecessary they were. Support for him was in the air, unlike in New England, where Hugh and I had spent the previous nine days. There, I saw a great many yard signs reading, “Resist!”
But resist how? I’d wondered, looking out the window at the picturesque cottages. Do we lie in the middle of the road? Do we not pay our taxes? Somebody tell me what to do.
A week earlier, in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, I’d come upon a dozen and a half “No Kings!” protesters whooping and chanting on a downtown street corner. Most were of retirement age and brandished signs at the oncoming traffic. It was hot and muggy, yet one member of their group, a bearded man playing the accordion, wore a fleece-lined winter hat with flaps over his ears. It pained me to admit it, but they looked like kooks, like Tea Party demonstrators during Obama’s first term. Who cast this thing? I caught myself wondering, as they seemed the worst possible advertisement for the Democratic Party: “Join us! We folk-dance!”
As I passed them, I thought back to the early Civil Rights protesters: the well-groomed men in suits and ties, the women in dresses. All of their signs were clearly lettered, likely by professionals, none with crudely drawn penises on…