The Distance Between Two Points

I know what a hundred miles feels like. I spent a year doing a weekly commute from college to home.The distance never changed, but the way I dealt with it did. To be fair, the stated mileage from Boulder to Colorado Springs is ninety-eight miles, but I bumped it up to account for the distance from my freshman dorm to the highway, and coming off onto surface streets to my parents' house. The route never changed. I did.
The first weekend of my college career, there were activities and indoctrinations that required that I stay there. After that, I would pop out of class on Friday afternoon, pick up my laundry bag from my dorm room and head out to the parking lot across the street. I knew that if I was careful and clever, I could get through Denver without getting bogged down in rush hour traffic. That would put me back at home in time to get my dirty clothes dumped, and maybe even get a little home cooking before I went out into the Friday night. In my hometown. Not in Colorado Springs. Without my dorm buddies.
This disconnect caused periodic friction with my friends who felt that I was abandoning them. It helped insure that I would be seen as a bit of an outsider whenever the ranks closed on Slocum One North. But it was only a hundred miles away. All that familiarity. All that fun. All that comfort. All that free laundry. Did I mention there was a girl?
That hundred miles seemed to fly by when I was driving up on Friday afternoon. But I would do everything I could to put off leaving, sometimes in the pre-dawn hours of Monday morning so that I could still make it to class. In my glove box I kept a series of ninety minute cassettes, each of which was just long enough to get me from one major radio market to the next. I could listen to KILO in Colorado Springs until I got just outside the city limits, then I would pop in one of those tapes. If I managed to tuck my VW Bug in the draft of a semi, I could be in range of KBCO in Boulder before I had to flip the tape a second time.
That was way back when I was going to get married the first time. I drove a couple of hundred miles every weekend for love. Then we broke up. But I didn't stop making that trip. I started dragging my friends from college along with me. One of them decided to transfer along with me back to Boulder. The next year, my commute was more like one hundred yards. But from then on, every time I see a sign on the highway that says a hundred miles, I know exactly what it means.