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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I won’t go into detail on the hours we spent standing at a payphone, having our patience strained by the customer service crew at the other end of Budget’s 800 service number. For the most part, we kept driving and stopping to check to see if they’d found us a new car carrier. Even doped-up on their kitty valiums, Callie and Maggie came out of their holes to sit in Beth’s lap and keep her company during her miles with them. Finally, we phoned in and found that a trailer had been located in New Orleans. If you look at…
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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…
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I still clearly remember the time, place, circumstances, and even the paper that I wrote on, when I penned the following short poem over 24 years ago. I was headed to Champaign, Illinois, to complete the technical school component of my initial U.S. Air Force training. It was my first real freedom since my last previous airplane rides had delivered me from Orlando into Houston into San Antonio, whereupon my basic training promptly began. I recall finding it odd that I was scheduled to arrive on a Friday afternoon… but it was worse than I could have imagined.