It’s dark outside, and quiet. The songbirds are still sleeping, the cafes shuttered, the stars washed out by rain. It’s five in the morning and I’m driving down wet, lonely roads, headed for the highway. I have a hundred miles of asphalt in front of me, and then hundreds more of sky. I’m a good ten hours away from a warm couch, a cold beer, or a familiar face, and my journey has just begun.

It’s a long haul, but I’ve been having trouble getting much sympathy. I’m heading down to Puerto Rico, after all, to old San Juan, for a long weekend with an old friend. There will be stories and song, sand in the toes, a camping trip to Vieques, pina coladas made from fresh coconuts. There will not be much pity to go around.

Certainly I’ve gotten no pity from my wife, who is staying behind in Asheville with the kids to change all the diapers, cool all the crises, and not drink pina coladas made from fresh coconuts.

Certainly I’ve gotten no pity from my colleagues in education, many of whom will spend the weekend heading in to do a few more hours of unpaid work to prepare their classrooms for the coming year.

Certainly I’ve gotten no pity from my non-teaching friends, who somehow don’t get the notion that after eight weeks off, I need a final fling in the tropics before returning to work.

And I don’t seem to have gotten any pity from the truckers on this soggy interstate, who give me no quarter, riding my tail and filling my battered Tercel with the sharp glare of headlights.

No, I haven’t gotten much sympathy, but I think I’ll manage. The anticipation alone makes up for it — of camping and coconuts, to be sure, but even more of seeing an old college friend, a good-hearted chump whom I haven’t seen in years. We were thick as thieves once, sharing a house, a major, a faculty advisor, and the occasional case of beer. We discussed Nietszche together, listened to Taj Mahal, and dissected the daily box scores. We ate lasagna, chased the bean, and compared our romantic exploits, which can best be described as lackluster and rare, though not for lack of effort.

And we graduated together, all tassel and cap and pomp and circumstance, to go our separate ways, he to Seattle and San Juan, me to Austin and Asheville. We found lovely wives and lovely children — his four to my two (children, that is, not wives) — and abandoned our degrees in Religious Studies to become Special Education teachers, with few regrets, if any.

We haven’t lost touch. We talk on the phone now and then, and last year’s Red Sox playoff drive unleashed a torrent of traded e-mail which still fills my inbox with echoes of hope and despair. But it’s been an awful long time since I sat down next to him, clapped my hand on his shoulder, and said, ‘How you been?’

In ten hours, I’ll do just that.

I don’t pity me either.

(Jay Hardwig is a writer and teacher. He can be reached at smardwig@charter.net)