The summer after I turned sixteen, my aunt invited me to come to Littleton, Colorado, to spend the summer with her, her twenty-year-old boyfriend, and my two younger cousins. She made dental appliances—you know, retainers. I was going out to Colorado to spend my summer making retainers. The retainer part actually sounded kind of cool. But it was the whole Denver-Rocky-Mountain-sixteen-year-old-on-my-own thing that was the real draw.

I mean, come on. Right?

Even my parents thought it was a great opportunity.

But getting out there was the big hurdle. My folks couldn’t afford to fly me to Denver. But for $100 or so, I could take a Greyhound bus. It sounded like a minor inconvenience, but I soon learned that 36 straight hours on any means of conveyance is a really long time. Like, a really long time. This was before Walkmans, let alone cell phones, iPads, streaming movies, or podcasts. I had a few books, a magazine, and a three-pound bag of this new treat, recently made famous by Ronald Reagan, Jelly Bellies.

I shouldn’t complain. I mean, Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska are packed with scenic vistas—that is, if you take aesthetic pleasure from watching corn go by at 60 miles an hour. So. much. corn.

Brutal.

And it wasn’t like I was going to go out of my way to talk to anybody. I was an introverted kid who never met a conversation with a stranger he didn’t want to have.

The whole experience is one I look back on with a particular fondness all these years later. But at the time, I was pretty sure I had just survived an epic transcontinental tour of the nation’s cornfields on a bus that reeked of Marlboro Reds, body odor, and regret. In fact, throughout the summer, memories of that 36-hour ride left me anxious about the ride back to Michigan.

But the summer itself was pretty fun. I got to do a lot of site-seeing. Went to a town that looked like it was the set of High Plains Drifter, lacking only tumbleweeds blowing down Main Street. It had the inconceivable name of “Cinderella City.” It was pretty great. Of course, it was biker week, so I saw a lot of things that, as a sixteen-year-old, I’d never seen before.

We also went to that iconic outdoor music venue, Red Rocks. We waited in the sun all day to see .38 Special and Jefferson Starship. I sat next to a biker named Sunny, who drank wine from a wineskin, dressed in jeans and nothing but a leather vest. Even if he hadn’t introduced himself to me, I would have known his name was Sunny because he had it tattooed on his neck—which, forty years ago—was either a name or something of a personal vision statement.

Anyway, I had fun over the first two months. But heading into August, I started thinking about home. I missed my friends and family. I’d been pretty lonely those first two months—which is not a bad thing for an introvert. Plenty of time to read and watch the Cubs on WGN. And even though my aunt was great and her boyfriend was mostly nice, I started feeling isolated. Eventually, it got so bad that I called my parents and said I wanted to come home early. And they said, “That’s fine. We’ll send you money for a bus ticket.”

But that didn’t give me any solace. I mean, I was homesick, sure. But 36 hours is a long time. Such. a. long. time. I couldn’t bear the thought of it. As it turns out, my folks were about to fly through Denver on their way back from California. After much wrangling (probably more aptly, after much whining), they said they’d see if they could get me a seat on their flight home.

They called me back later to say that the flight was sold out … except for on first-class ticket. “Great!” I thought. “Just buy that.”

I’m an adult now, so I understand why my dad’s reaction struck me as less than enthusiastic about the plan. Our people didn’t fly first class. We still don’t fly first class. It’s just too dang expensive—especially for what amounted to a two-and-a-half-hour flight. “Absolutely not.”

But the urge to get home was so strong for me by this time that I begged. “Please! You’ve got to get me on that flight. I have to get home.”

I have never felt so homesick and abandoned as I did after my parents told me that I’d just have to take that stupid Grayhound back. I’m still not sure why I felt so strongly about it. I can’t explain why I was convinced that there was no way I could do it. Obviously, I could have. I’d done it before. But now, something pulled me so firmly back toward home that I couldn’t wait even 36 hours more to get there.

It’s a tribute to my parent’s love for me that they sent my aunt my dad’s credit card and had her buy me a first-class ticket back to Grand Rapids, Michigan. This was before Expedia. Heck, it was almost before credit cards.

And I said, “my parents,” but I knew my mom would do it in a heartbeat. My dad had to face down his inner Ebenezer Scrooge to come to that decision.

Looking back on it, my dad never learned to be especially emotionally available. Because of how he was raised, he had difficulty saying, “I love you.” But in retrospect, there were times like these when he fought every impulse that had made him the man he was to express his love for me by doing something his father would never have considered doing for him. As awkwardly detached as my dad so often was, he somehow understood that the most important thing in the world for me was finding my way back home.

I will love him forever for that.