Arc of the Poet Part 1: Life Poetry Part 2: Tour de Force Part 3: True Love Part 4: Spinning Out Part 5: Wake-Up Call Part 6: Serious Dreams Part 7: Home Stretch Part 8: Feedback Part 9: Dear Departures Part 10: Good Poetry Part 11: Rewrites Part 12: Resistance Part 13: Fame and Fortune Part 14: Ramblings Part 15: Being Between 1978 and 1989, I went from 12 to 23 … from wondering about being a man to being one. I have a short stack of decent poetic writings from those days, and as you’d expect, they are about…
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I’ve written here before about my “Ramble” creative writing project. On Dec. 30 of 2009, I sat down to write a Ramble entry for my late grandmother Beatrice Ridings, who was widely known to many as Granny Bea, Aunt Bea, or Ms. Ridings. I had two wonderful grandmothers who have now passed on, and luckily for me, Grandma Eileen Darnell, who we called Bam, was also tight with Granny Bea, so on more than one occasion, I was able to enjoy them both simultaneously. At long last, I have published a separate collection for Grandma Bam, and below, I am…
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In case you missed yesterday’s report, we did finally catch my dad (aka Big Jim, or BJ) at Cracker Barrel, along with Peggy, my step-mom. We all had a nice dinner together somewhere around 9pm, and then we all made it to the Ramada there in Crossville, Tennessee. But darned if BJ didn’t have another trick up his sleeve, and sure enough, he beat us to Boone… by about an hour! First, though, I need to back up a little.
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Saturday, June 2, 2001: Almost There The wake-up call came at six Central time, and it actually succeeded in getting Beth to arise (it most certainly was wasted on me). Once awake, this hotel wasn’t a hard one to leave quickly, but we were a little worried to find Callie sitting in the front window, considering that pets weren’t allowed. Oh well — we figured that, if we receive a call from someone asking why they’d seen a one-eyed calico cat in our hotel room’s window, we’ll just say, “You saw a what?!”
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Friday, June 1, 2001: Catching Up Waking up, of course, there they were, under the bed; and there I was, lifting the bed so Beth could scramble under to grab them, give each of our cats their ‘medicine’ and stow them in their carriers. This stuff is getting easier…. We’d settled into a nice hotel on night one, but still the sounds of the highway and the endless passing trains got us going early — or so we thought.
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Thursday, May 31, 2001: Simply Grand It was time to get up and get moving, but by letting Maggie slip under the covers and curl up, we were able to grab a few more minutes’ rest. Lying there returning to our senses, all the great memories were just cobwebs; the focus was all about getting on the road. All the last junk was piled near the door soon enough, and we made it to Budget by seven, just after they’d opened, to get Dad registered to drive the truck. We were among the first customers in our favorite breakfast spot…
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It was 4 in the morning when Maggie woke me up to let me know Callie couldn’t sleep. I got up and played with them a bit, peeking out the window to see that our possessions were still ours, then climbed back into bed to make the most of the warm bed where, unbeknownst to me, Beth was having a nightmare. She had also been woken up and had seen me looking out the window, but then, she fell back asleep. In her dream, I turned to her from the window and said, “Well, we might as well get going,”…
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At the free continental breakfast at the La Quinta (which in Spanish, according to a famous comedy routine, means Next to Denny’s), we met an older traveling salesman named Frank. As we spoke, he told me I need to get an agent in LA, and also that I’d do well to tie-into USC. People might not have much advice to offer if you move to many cities, but it seems almost everyone knows the recipe for success in LA. Frank seemed to have the handle on the basic ingredients, didn’t he? Bidding him adios, we loaded our cooler with more…
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It’s March 21, 2010, a Sunday, a little over 12 years after I emailed the following report to our friends and family members, the first of five installments documenting our move to California. Neither Beth nor I had ever been west of Texas before that time, but we were up for LA and fun new times with the dawn of 1998. So much has happened since then, for us and everyone we’ve met on this journey. Over the days ahead, I’ll be posting the other notes from this trek, followed by the photolog of our 2001 move to the Blue…