about "monetizing" the trip, pulled over on a deserted street, and left the car with me in tow as they approached a parked pickup truck, jimmied the lock and broke in. I don't know if they got much for their effort, but my heart raced as I realized that Jerry's access to all those fake IDs may have resulted from such activity as this.

We were about to get back into Dick's car when a flashlight suddenly shined in our faces and a huge, burly man in uniform blocked our way. Dick and Jerry seemed remarkably calm, knowing as they did that this was a security guard and not a cop. When he asked us what we were doing, we could barely stifle our laughter. The man, who stood about 6 foot 4 and weighed close to 300 lbs, spoke in a high-pitched squeal that I could only liken to the voice of Mickey Mouse.

"Just trying to get our bearings, Officer," Dick volunteered. "We don't live in Kansas City."

"Well, be on your way, then," Mickey's voice replied. "This is kind of a bad neighborhood. Lotta break-ins."

Dick and Jerry couldn't contain their laughter as we peeled away from the rent-a-cop and sped out back onto the Interstate. As for myself, I couldn't believe I was in the company of thieves. This was certainly a strange new world I was entering.

Dick dropped us off mid-morning about 10 miles north of East St. Louis, and I felt — as I stood there in one of the many spots my mother must have passed as a 15-year- old runaway in 1937 — a certain reverence for the place of my mother's childhood, this Land of Lincoln, a prairie flatland rich with cornfields, dotted with silos, lush with maples and lilacs in June. This was its own small world, as old as the Mississippi, as recent as the Depression, my mother's warm cocoon of sassafras bark and sentiment, the WPA, the model T Ford, mulberry bushes, black and white photo etchings of family long passed on, barbershops and old boyfriends.

Of course, Route 66 out of St. Louis into Illinois had been paved and remodeled 10 times over in those three decades, but I could feel the presence of generations here.

Oddly, I didn't think of my mother back in Sacramento