It’s funny, the roads life takes you on. You just never know where you’ll wind up.
Over the years, I’ve run a drug store, sold life insurance, stereo gear and radio advertising; newspaper advertising, too.
I’ve published four different newspapers and worked for five others. I even ran a radio station that only broadcast during daylight (we called it “solar powered radio”).
I’ve helped raise a couple of kids — and the daughter of the woman I love. I’ve trod the boards of several community theaters. Played guitar, spades and Risk.
I’ve seen a counselor and talked privately to several preachers. I’ve studied Zen, but not very hard.
I’ve argued with my Dad and tried to be a good one.
I’ve reported on ghastly traffic accidents that killed little kids. I’ve had to take the pictures for the DPS troopers.
Over my lifetime, I’ve lived in Harlingen, Elgin, Palacios, Corpus Christi, Victoria (twice), Taylor, Belton (twice), Austin (three times), Temple, Cameron and Marble Falls (twice). And that doesn’t count the year I spent in Alpine most of one spring.
I’ve been a Cub Scout, a Lion, a member of a church choir and I marched in the Cotton Bowl and in the Rose Bowl Parades.
I’m a Texan. I have a pair of cowboy boots and I played football in high school (but not very hard).
I’ve been through a divorce. When I married again, my new wife and I held the ceremony at the local VFW Hall. In all the pictures, a bingo sign hovers above our heads.
I’ve camped out at the top of a mountain and walked the streets of London at 2 a.m.
I’ve interviewed congressmen and a governor who became President, and slept in the home of an oil tycoon on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lohman.
I saw Frank Zappa at Armadillo World Headquarters, Stevie Ray Vaugh at Auditorium Shores and ZZ Top at Memorial Stadium.
I was a lifeguard at a church camp and bagged groceries and pumped gas.
I volunteered for Sissy Farenthold’s campaign for governor and helped park cars at LakeFest.
I actually planned to have very few of these experiences. Certainly, I’ve planned and executed specific events (you can’t fly to London without some advance preparation, not on my income) but, looking back, the grand sweep of my life’s major events have been somewhat spontaneous.
John Lennon was right when he said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”
It’s both the sublime beauty and ridiculous curse of this mortal coil. You may think you are driving toward a simple goal when life jerks you up by the short and curlies and reminds you that, sometimes, you’re simply a passenger on the journey because, this time, someone else is driving the bus.
So, I’ve learned to be flexible because few plans survive contact with the gears of life. Life is more than the plan. It is the journey. (Any good Calvinist would recognize the irony in these thoughts, especially as they are expressed by a lapsed Presbyterian.)
We didn’t plan to leave Cameron. Life presented us with an opportunity and we took it. We didn’t plan to live in Marble Falls (for the second time!) only six months. One of life’s other aspects – in this case, a teenager’s immutability combined with a mother’s love – re-focused our attention on life’s paramount claim.
So, Tia Rae and I are going back to Cameron, she to be her daughter’s mother and the Feature Editor of the Temple Daily Telegram, and me to be a supportive husband and step-father and — well, I don’t really know yet but something will turn up, I’m sure.
I don’t regret our decision to come to Marble Falls. I learned a lot and believe I made a difference for some of the people working at this newspaper. I’ll miss the friends we made here and dearly wish we could have stayed longer.
I do regret the opportunities we missed to reconnect with old friends. We were able to see a few of you but not enough, and not for nearly long enough.
But the road we’re on has taken a direction different from the one we’d planned to travel. Not because that’s what we planned, it’s just one of those funny things in life.
This was originally published in the River Cities Daily Tribune, August 2006.
