“Travels with Charley” is still on my bookshelf, third shelf down, between a field guide and a how-to book I never open. The dust jacket is gone. Ms. Tucker didn't have a dust jacket either when she read it aloud in fifth grade while the rest of the class napped on blue mats.

I have admired Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Kerouac from afar ever since, with an intense yearning to be akin to them all.

I didn't get the wars or the road or the migrant camps. I got the listening.

I pull it down and the weight is lighter than I remember. The pages at the middle fall open on their own, the way a book does when it's been opened to the same spot for years.

I read the first line out loud, just to hear it in the room. Steinbeck writes about being young and wanting to be someplace else. I don't do his voice. I do Ms. Tucker's. Slower than the other teachers, with a pause at every comma so the kids on the mats wouldn't miss the turn.

It's a long holiday weekend and we have no plans. Casey is asleep on the couch with the dogs piled against one leg. The dryer is thumping in the laundry room. We have a basket of clean clothes waiting to be folded and a short list of chores we wrote this morning and then ignored.

We have done the other kind. We have flown overseas and driven long domestic stretches. We have stood in lines for museums and for good barbecue. This time we decided to stay home.

I sit in the chair with Travels with Charley open on my lap. The house is quiet except for the dryer and the dogs breathing. The afternoon light comes through the blinds the same way it came through the windows in Ms. Tucker's classroom.

I am reading to go someplace else, because who doesn't read Steinbeck today without wanting to go someplace else. I am also reading to remember what it felt like to listen while everyone else slept. I read another line out loud, quiet enough not to wake Casey, loud enough to hear Ms. Tucker's pause at every comma.

For twenty minutes in fifth grade I learned how to travel without moving. This afternoon I get a small window to practice again. The chores will wait. The laundry will keep thumping. For now I have a book that still knows how to take me with it, and a house full of sleepers who taught me how to listen in the first place.

The dryer buzzes and stops. I still don't get up. Casey sighs in sleep and one dog stretches, then curls tighter.

I turn the page and find the part where Steinbeck stops at a diner just to listen to the waitress, and I can hear Ms. Tucker doing the same thing with his sentences, letting them sit on the table a minute before she picked them up again.

The page settles and suddenly I'm not in my chair anymore. I'm back in that classroom, but not on the mat. I'm at the desk next to a boy named David. Ms. Tucker is reading and David is drawing maps in the margin of his spelling workbook. He drew the same ridges we later walked.

David lived up the ridge from my Uncle Sherman, outside Cave City limits. We met in fourth grade and by ten we had a system. His mother would confirm with my mother and Friday after school she would have my things loaded in her old car. It was almost as banged up as Mom's. There I would stay until somebody finally picked me up Sunday afternoon. Mom worked two jobs at the time. Waiting tables, running a tanning salon for her uncle, even working in the tobacco fields whenever necessary.

We never carried much. A couple cans of stew, the kind with the pull tab that always cut your thumb. A sleeping bag each, rolled tight with twine. He took the single-shot .410 his uncle gave him. I carried a bolt-action Marlin .22, the stock worn smooth. We split a box of shells between our pockets and filled a canteen from the tap.

We walked out before the sun was up because that was the best part, the world still deciding whether to be cold or not. The hills above Mammoth Cave are not tall but they fold in on themselves. You can lose a morning in a hollow and come out a mile from where you thought you were. We liked that. In winter the leaves were down and you could see the limestone showing through like bone. In summer the woods closed in and the air got thick and green. It didn't matter to us. We went when we could get away.

We stayed out at least one night, usually two. We didn't have a plan beyond walking until we were tired and then finding a flat spot near water. We built small fires and heated the stew right in the can, burned our fingers, ate with a pocketknife. When the cans were gone we shot what we could. Squirrel in the oaks, rabbit along the field edge. We cleaned them badly and cooked them too fast and told each other they tasted fine. They mostly did.

What I remember most isn't the hunting. It's the listening we did out there. We didn't talk much after the first mile. We listened for the creek we couldn't see yet, for a turkey moving uphill, for the far-off sound of a car on 31W that told us how far we'd come. At night we lay in our bags and listened to the woods settle. David could name owls by their call. I could not, so I just listened and let him be right.

That is what Ms. Tucker's reading gave us later. She taught us how to sit still while a story moved. David and I had already practiced that in the woods, waiting for a squirrel to show. The classroom just gave it a name.

We drifted after middle school. His family didn't move. I heard years later he went to work for the railroad like his dad. I never met my father, so his dad Randall was like a hero to me. I still remember the time Randall shot out the security light with a 30-06 while he and some friends were target practicing in the back field. I haven't seen him in thirty years, but when I turn a page and Steinbeck stops to talk to a waitress, I hear David again, whispering in a kitchen at five in the morning, saying we should take the ridge trail this time, not the creek.

The book does that. It doesn't just take me back to fifth grade. It takes me past it, to the friend who taught me how to leave early, travel light, and pay attention to what the woods were saying. That is a different kind of being someone else. Not Hemingway or Kerouac. Just a ten-year-old boy with a too-big sleeping bag, thinking two days was forever.

I think about why I reached for Steinbeck today and not the others. Hemingway is two books over, too bold for today. Kerouac is wedged by the cookbook, too restless. Not today.

Steinbeck fits because he is softer. He does not tell you to conquer. He tells you to notice. He pulls over at a diner not to eat fast and leave, but to hear the waitress talk about her son. He drives across the country and writes down what people say when they think no one important is listening. That is the same work Ms. Tucker was doing when she read to a room of napping children. She was not performing. She was letting the words do their slow work.

The world feels loud right now. There are too many horrible things happening at once, and the news brings them into the kitchen. It makes me want to turn the sound down everywhere else. Steinbeck turns the sound down for me. He gives me one voice at a time.

Money is part of it too. Prices are too high to justify us constantly going. Gas is up, flights are up, a hotel room costs what a week used to cost. We have been to Florida twice this year and it is barely summer. Last two trips to Florida were ruined by weather, a tornado warning on the Gulf side, then constant rain the whole time we were in Saint Augustine. We came home tired from the miles and from adding it all up.

Staying home this weekend is not a punishment. It is a decision. We looked at the calendar, we looked at the weather, we looked at each other, and we chose the porch and the laundry and the dogs. It feels responsible and it also feels kind. There is a softness to choosing less when everything else is shouting for more.

That is why Steinbeck works today. He understood that kind of softness. He wrote about men who had very little and still found a way to offer a cup of coffee. He wrote about being on the road and still being lonely for a familiar chair. He never pretended travel fixed everything. He let travel be a way to listen better.

I think Ms. Tucker knew that, even if she never said it. She picked Charley for a reason. She chose a man and a dog driving slow, stopping to talk. She gave us twenty minutes where nothing exploded. We just listened while the light moved across the floor.

Casey makes a small sound in sleep, not quite a snore. The dogs do not move. The house holds the quiet the way a good sentence holds a pause. I realize I am not waiting for the weekend to be over so we can go somewhere. I am waiting for nothing. I am already where I need to be, with a book that does not ask me to be brave, only to pay attention.

That feels like enough for a holiday. That feels like enough for a life. Travel will come again when it needs to. Today I will practice the part I am actually good at, the part Ms. Tucker taught me without meaning to. I will listen. It is a quiet kind of courage, and it suits this house on a hot holiday weekend.

I have admired Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Kerouac from afar, with an intense yearning to be akin to them all, and for twenty minutes in fifth grade I actually was. Not because I traveled, but because I listened while everyone else slept.