When I first arrived in the Valley
From Metropolitan Atlanta and the Empire state
It was dark as black powder,
Night-time in the Shenandoah
And the honest blue of the sky and the sweet cream clouds
Which crowned the emerald green of the grass feeding the cattle
Was hidden from my eyes
Until the next morning, when God himself
Tricked me again with a morning flow of thick fog
Which blanketed the old Confederate's campus
With an antique grey I wouldn't have expected
But which certainly provided an appropriate formal dress-coat
To the winding Victorian streets
Of Lexington, Virginia
Where Jackson had drilled his Rockbridge boys
And Lee had sternly lectured the remnant
Who would want nothing more, like me, than a glimpse
Of old Marse Robert on his dappled war charger, Traveller,
Seeking solace from the gentle rise of the dusty lanes
Hidden among the Blue Ridge foothills
Out in the country in Rockbridge County.
Tuesday, October 9, 2007
Tuesday morning in McDonough, sans client
This morning came early and my body would not rise sufficiently to allow me to carry on with the early morning items until it was getting later and Cindy had already made her own coffee. Tex needed to be taken outside and I stood out in the moist morning and wondered if my client would meet me at the Judicial Center in McDonough for our hearing scheduled for 9:00 o'clock that morning.
Cindy was clearly not moving as fast as she needed to in order to get her on the tarmac at Griffin Tech at 8:00 so that I would be able to get to the courthouse at the time at which I aimed. Nevertheless, I dropped her off and headed up toward to State Route 20 and the road to McDonough.
I arrived at the Judicial Center around twenty before nine and sat and waited for him to arrive. I had called several numbers for him the night before. None of the numbers I had was working or accepting incoming calls. When it got too close to nine o'clock, I went into the courtroom and sat down to await calendar call. The judge finally entered the courtroom and began calling the cases. When he got to mine I acknowledged that I was counsel for the Defendant and that he was absent. The judge allowed me some more time to try to get ahold of my client.
I went back out into the lobby outside and courtroom and tried to call my client. I never reached him. Finally, the judge called the case and heard my argument about the lack of personal jurisdiction over my client. The judge granted my argument and transfered the two cases to Spalding County and Bibb County, respectively.
I drove back home and bought lunch for Cindy and myself. When I got to Griffin Tech, I drug the meals and Cindy's box of soft drinks from the parking lot down through the cafeteria, past the never-ending construction site, down the long downstairs hall to the elevator, up to the second floor, and down the hallway to the library, past the never-ending construction site, and into the library, past the Head Librarian, who never says hello, never acknowledges my presence, is constantly on the computer, never seems to have any contact with any of the other employees, leaves early sometimes, is painfully shy, etc., etc., etc. to my wife's office in the back of the back of the back.
There I shared lunch time with Cindy until it was time for her to work and me to go home and let the dog out, again, and fall asleep in front of Homocide: Life on the Streets.
Now I am here. Wondering about the next closing.
Cindy was clearly not moving as fast as she needed to in order to get her on the tarmac at Griffin Tech at 8:00 so that I would be able to get to the courthouse at the time at which I aimed. Nevertheless, I dropped her off and headed up toward to State Route 20 and the road to McDonough.
I arrived at the Judicial Center around twenty before nine and sat and waited for him to arrive. I had called several numbers for him the night before. None of the numbers I had was working or accepting incoming calls. When it got too close to nine o'clock, I went into the courtroom and sat down to await calendar call. The judge finally entered the courtroom and began calling the cases. When he got to mine I acknowledged that I was counsel for the Defendant and that he was absent. The judge allowed me some more time to try to get ahold of my client.
I went back out into the lobby outside and courtroom and tried to call my client. I never reached him. Finally, the judge called the case and heard my argument about the lack of personal jurisdiction over my client. The judge granted my argument and transfered the two cases to Spalding County and Bibb County, respectively.
I drove back home and bought lunch for Cindy and myself. When I got to Griffin Tech, I drug the meals and Cindy's box of soft drinks from the parking lot down through the cafeteria, past the never-ending construction site, down the long downstairs hall to the elevator, up to the second floor, and down the hallway to the library, past the never-ending construction site, and into the library, past the Head Librarian, who never says hello, never acknowledges my presence, is constantly on the computer, never seems to have any contact with any of the other employees, leaves early sometimes, is painfully shy, etc., etc., etc. to my wife's office in the back of the back of the back.
There I shared lunch time with Cindy until it was time for her to work and me to go home and let the dog out, again, and fall asleep in front of Homocide: Life on the Streets.
Now I am here. Wondering about the next closing.
Monday, October 8, 2007
Columbus Day
This afternoon is dead. I am sitting here with little to do and less desire to find anything to replace it. I have sent my secretary home and it feels like the time to drive myself home. I have made efforts to handle the crises of the day and I will do better to go home and spend some time with my wife.
This is one of those odd mid-range holidays when more people than you expect take the day off, or expect you to be off yourself. You end up spinning your wheels and wondering if it just would have been better to stay in bed.
I suppose the lesson here is hidden in the event that we celebrate. In a time when most people in Europe thought that the dangers of travelling across the longitudinal lines between Europe and the unknown to the west were too daunting to attempt. Some people thought that the world was larger. Some thought it flat. Some thought monsters lay in wait for the traveller. Most simply stayed in bed (figuratively).
But Christobal Columbo was different. He saw the possibility of glory and fame and achievement. For three times, he approached the King and Queen of Spain before they had the gold and desire to provide him with three leaky, wooden vessels to sail westward toward the possibility of a western route to India. He was Buzz Aldrin and Neal Armstrong and Mike Collins all rolled into one. When he touched dry land in the Bahamas, he might as well have touched down on the moon.
In America we celebrate that kind of effort. Though he was not the first to the New World, off on his location on the globe and far from correct on his vision of the earth, he still showed the persistence and desire and vision we hold dear in this country. That is why we celebrate him today and have named so many cities, towns, counties, etc. in his honor.
Well, anyway, on to better things.
This is one of those odd mid-range holidays when more people than you expect take the day off, or expect you to be off yourself. You end up spinning your wheels and wondering if it just would have been better to stay in bed.
I suppose the lesson here is hidden in the event that we celebrate. In a time when most people in Europe thought that the dangers of travelling across the longitudinal lines between Europe and the unknown to the west were too daunting to attempt. Some people thought that the world was larger. Some thought it flat. Some thought monsters lay in wait for the traveller. Most simply stayed in bed (figuratively).
But Christobal Columbo was different. He saw the possibility of glory and fame and achievement. For three times, he approached the King and Queen of Spain before they had the gold and desire to provide him with three leaky, wooden vessels to sail westward toward the possibility of a western route to India. He was Buzz Aldrin and Neal Armstrong and Mike Collins all rolled into one. When he touched dry land in the Bahamas, he might as well have touched down on the moon.
In America we celebrate that kind of effort. Though he was not the first to the New World, off on his location on the globe and far from correct on his vision of the earth, he still showed the persistence and desire and vision we hold dear in this country. That is why we celebrate him today and have named so many cities, towns, counties, etc. in his honor.
Well, anyway, on to better things.
October afternoons, past and present
Why do these memories pop into my mind?
I was sitting in the living room of a townhouse on the campus of Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, watching the football team from the state university in Athens, Georgia receive a butt-whooping from the football team from the state university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Some of my daughter's friends were sitting around with us, along with a couple other parents, drinking refreshments and eating potato chips, watching the game.
Suddenly, the synapses in my brain were drawn back to a weekend in late October or early November in 1978, I don't remember which, when my parents drove up from Atlanta along the spine of the Blue Ridge to Lexington, Virginia to watch my last home game as a college football player against Emory & Henry, another small college in western Virginia. My college football career was in its last year and this would be the last time I would play on Wilson field before the friends and faculty and family assembled that beautiful Fall afternoon among the orange and scarlet leaves and soft, cool breezes of Rockbridge County, Virginia.
We only had one year in which we came close to winning more games than we lost during my entire college football career. Most years we struggled from week to week, only looking forward to two or three weeks of our schedule when we were confident we could win the games those weeks. My senior year was no different.
In previous years, we had lost two straight games to Emory & Henry. In 1976, they had brought a strong team up to Lexington in the first week of the season and defeated us handily. In my junior year of 1977, we played them in Emory, Virginia and lost 7-6. It seemed like every game in my junior year was the same. We rarely scored. On defense, we would allow one long drive in which the other team would score and then our offense would fumble or throw an interception near our goal-line which would lead to another score. In that game, I remember I had been introduced as Tom Bynum from Dinwiddie, Virginia, and I had yelled my fruitless objections to a rainy, windy sky and an uncaring crowd in Emory, Virginia. No response availing, no correction given, we lost that game in the usual way, by a close score, only allowing one touchdown from the opposing team in the muck and rain, after the inevitable fumble by our own offense inside our ten yard line.
Anyway, as the fall of 1978 wound itself out, we again had lost more games than we had won, despite the fact that we had a new coach, whose program and prodding had promised success somewhere in the future. Nevertheless, that week we faced an Emory & Henry team that was fairly evenly matched with us. Their offense had little running attack and they depended on a quarterback with a strong arm to compensate for the lack of defense and running offense.
As the game began, our offense miraculously scored three times unanswered, and we led the game 18-0 at half time. The first half was so promising. After gaining little by running on first and second downs, the Emory & Henry quarterback would invariably take the snap, roll to his left or right, only to find Greg Lilly or myself in his face, or, even sometimes, on top of him for a loss. Even if we didn't sack the quarterback, we often raised our arms in the air to block his passes.
During that first half of football, there came a number of moments when the furies that can awaken in one's mind and body when the emotions you are feeling match the goals in your mind and the collective struggles of the teammates around me and I found myself tackling the quarterback sharply into the green turf to the approval of my teammates and the parents and students in the stands.
There was a play in the first half of that game which I will never forget. The ball was snapped and the movement of the backfield moved away from me in an option play to the opposite side of the field. As I trailed the ball from behind like a shark toward a school of baitfish, our strong side linebacker penetrated across the line of scrimmage and pounded the quarterback from the side, spinning his body around so hard that he swung around and he faced me in my line of pursuit. As I came up from behind, I hit him with all I had at full speed and drove his head back, backward until the back of his helmet found its way to the hard ground. When I got off of him, I noticed his body twitching and jerking as his mind was lost into the interiors of his consciousness. I stood over his body and took extreme pleasure, like some predator in the forest, in the lack of intelligent and controlled movement coming from his being.
As I stood there, I began to exult over the product of my effort and the competitive air of conquest breathed deeply through my nostrils. But then, as I returned to the defensive huddle and watched the trainers for Emory & Henry examine the prone quarterback, I stopped and considered the true result of my actions, and realized that here lay another college student, just like me, who was lying on the field, and would be carried off by stretcher to find a clean bed in the local hospital, for observation. The struggle of my emotions at that moment caught me and caused some introspection that you don't often get on a football field.
This game was a struggle and became more so as the game progressed. I remember play after play when the other team seemed to throw multiple players in my path as I tried to slip past them, over and over again, to try to take hold of the quarterback before he threw. I remember stout fullbacks and tall, heavy tackles running at me and my efforts to take them on, to throw or give slip to them to the left and to the right, meanwhile trying to catch a glimpse of the progress of the quarterback as he hid himself behind their bulk and tossed pass after pass downfield.
The second half seemed to play out in the same way, play after play. Our offense managed no more points in the game, and Emory & Henry continued to march down the field toward the end zone as we tried to defend it. Pass after pass went over my head toward some ill-defended receiver. I managed to sack the quarterback one time, when he rolled away from me and I ran past the tackle, my foot speed compensating for his superior size, to find the backside of the quarterback, driving my facemask into his backbone, pitching his body into the grass before he threw downfield. Another time, he turned and tried to lateral the pigskin toward a halfback on a sweep, who missed the ball, and I was able to roll and cradle my body around the loose ball, recovering a fumble and ending another drive toward our goal.
But it was too little. When the final horn sounded, we had lost 20-18. I remember wandering off the field toward our lockerroom underneath the stadium. As I found my home locker for the last time, the emotional response to that loss and all the effort for nothing, the experience of the last loss at my personal locker built under those stands at my alma mater, hit me, and I sat heavily down on the bench seat in my grass-stained uniform and wept deeply into my hands. As I sat there and cried, one of the defensive coaches who had been in the coach's box above the field during the game, came up to me and put his arms around my shoulders and tried to console me. He told me that my effort had been amazing. And I think he cried too.
The locker room was silent or nearly so. It was as if someone or something had passed on. Players struggled to remove their uniforms and pads and trudged off to the showers. I took a small bar of ivory soap and a white cotton towel and walked like a zombie to the showers. I know I showered and dried my body off and dressed in my street clothes. I know I walked the short walk from the deserted stands to my apartment after the game, but I don't remember any of it.
I do remember opening the door to the apartment I shared with four other athletes to find all of our parents sitting in chairs around the living room, sharing some time together as their sons arrived, one by one, from the field. I am sure I was the last one there. I remember cutting my eyes toward my parents and mumbling something about needing to lay down. My mother and father followed behind me to my room. I undressed and lay down under the comfort of the sheets and my blanket. My mother stroked my temples and said they would check on me later. I fell asleep.
Later, my parents came in and asked me if I wanted to go to eat with the group. I couldn't; I was aching and felt the flue symptoms that came from the release of so much adrenalyn and emotion. They left me in the dark of late October outside my windows and the comfort of my bed.
Only later did I recover enough to want to feed the hunger which my body had developed, which had been hidden from me by the warring of chemicals and electrical synapses running inside my body and my mind.
I have only had two other football games which caught me up so strongly. One game occurred when I was about nine years old, playing little league football in Atlanta. The other occurred in the third game of my senior year in high school at North Dekalb Stadium in Chamblee, Georgia. In the first one, we came away with a hard-earned victory against a team roughly our equal. In the second one, we played against the best team in Dekalb County, a team which would later find their way to the state championship against Thomasville High School sometime in December of that year. At the end of that game, the coaches drove us back to the parking lot on the north side of Dunwoody High School and back to the lockerroom. I pushed my forehead on the bus seat in front of me and moaned my misery in the hearing of the player in front of me. As the bus pulled into the Dunwoody parking lot, I exited and trudged back down toward lockerroom. Suddenly, all of the pain and misery of the evening welled up inside and spilled itself onto the pavement of the parking lot. After releasing the bile collected in my stomach during that game all over the parking lot at Dunwoody High School, I at least was named Dekalb County Defensive Lineman of the Week.
But this weekend in Virginia was the last chance to give everything in a game in such an effort. From here out my struggles would be more intellectual and academic. Only the opportunity to say goodbye to my parents on the Sunday morning following the game and the promise of the next weekend's trip to watch me play on the fields at Georgetown University offered any solace for my efforts on that gorgeous Autumn day in Lexington, Virginia.
This is what I remembered suddenly in the living room of a townhouse in Clinton, South Carolina on October 6, 2007. Just a brief moment's memory, but so many years to travel.
I was sitting in the living room of a townhouse on the campus of Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, watching the football team from the state university in Athens, Georgia receive a butt-whooping from the football team from the state university in Knoxville, Tennessee. Some of my daughter's friends were sitting around with us, along with a couple other parents, drinking refreshments and eating potato chips, watching the game.
Suddenly, the synapses in my brain were drawn back to a weekend in late October or early November in 1978, I don't remember which, when my parents drove up from Atlanta along the spine of the Blue Ridge to Lexington, Virginia to watch my last home game as a college football player against Emory & Henry, another small college in western Virginia. My college football career was in its last year and this would be the last time I would play on Wilson field before the friends and faculty and family assembled that beautiful Fall afternoon among the orange and scarlet leaves and soft, cool breezes of Rockbridge County, Virginia.
We only had one year in which we came close to winning more games than we lost during my entire college football career. Most years we struggled from week to week, only looking forward to two or three weeks of our schedule when we were confident we could win the games those weeks. My senior year was no different.
In previous years, we had lost two straight games to Emory & Henry. In 1976, they had brought a strong team up to Lexington in the first week of the season and defeated us handily. In my junior year of 1977, we played them in Emory, Virginia and lost 7-6. It seemed like every game in my junior year was the same. We rarely scored. On defense, we would allow one long drive in which the other team would score and then our offense would fumble or throw an interception near our goal-line which would lead to another score. In that game, I remember I had been introduced as Tom Bynum from Dinwiddie, Virginia, and I had yelled my fruitless objections to a rainy, windy sky and an uncaring crowd in Emory, Virginia. No response availing, no correction given, we lost that game in the usual way, by a close score, only allowing one touchdown from the opposing team in the muck and rain, after the inevitable fumble by our own offense inside our ten yard line.
Anyway, as the fall of 1978 wound itself out, we again had lost more games than we had won, despite the fact that we had a new coach, whose program and prodding had promised success somewhere in the future. Nevertheless, that week we faced an Emory & Henry team that was fairly evenly matched with us. Their offense had little running attack and they depended on a quarterback with a strong arm to compensate for the lack of defense and running offense.
As the game began, our offense miraculously scored three times unanswered, and we led the game 18-0 at half time. The first half was so promising. After gaining little by running on first and second downs, the Emory & Henry quarterback would invariably take the snap, roll to his left or right, only to find Greg Lilly or myself in his face, or, even sometimes, on top of him for a loss. Even if we didn't sack the quarterback, we often raised our arms in the air to block his passes.
During that first half of football, there came a number of moments when the furies that can awaken in one's mind and body when the emotions you are feeling match the goals in your mind and the collective struggles of the teammates around me and I found myself tackling the quarterback sharply into the green turf to the approval of my teammates and the parents and students in the stands.
There was a play in the first half of that game which I will never forget. The ball was snapped and the movement of the backfield moved away from me in an option play to the opposite side of the field. As I trailed the ball from behind like a shark toward a school of baitfish, our strong side linebacker penetrated across the line of scrimmage and pounded the quarterback from the side, spinning his body around so hard that he swung around and he faced me in my line of pursuit. As I came up from behind, I hit him with all I had at full speed and drove his head back, backward until the back of his helmet found its way to the hard ground. When I got off of him, I noticed his body twitching and jerking as his mind was lost into the interiors of his consciousness. I stood over his body and took extreme pleasure, like some predator in the forest, in the lack of intelligent and controlled movement coming from his being.
As I stood there, I began to exult over the product of my effort and the competitive air of conquest breathed deeply through my nostrils. But then, as I returned to the defensive huddle and watched the trainers for Emory & Henry examine the prone quarterback, I stopped and considered the true result of my actions, and realized that here lay another college student, just like me, who was lying on the field, and would be carried off by stretcher to find a clean bed in the local hospital, for observation. The struggle of my emotions at that moment caught me and caused some introspection that you don't often get on a football field.
This game was a struggle and became more so as the game progressed. I remember play after play when the other team seemed to throw multiple players in my path as I tried to slip past them, over and over again, to try to take hold of the quarterback before he threw. I remember stout fullbacks and tall, heavy tackles running at me and my efforts to take them on, to throw or give slip to them to the left and to the right, meanwhile trying to catch a glimpse of the progress of the quarterback as he hid himself behind their bulk and tossed pass after pass downfield.
The second half seemed to play out in the same way, play after play. Our offense managed no more points in the game, and Emory & Henry continued to march down the field toward the end zone as we tried to defend it. Pass after pass went over my head toward some ill-defended receiver. I managed to sack the quarterback one time, when he rolled away from me and I ran past the tackle, my foot speed compensating for his superior size, to find the backside of the quarterback, driving my facemask into his backbone, pitching his body into the grass before he threw downfield. Another time, he turned and tried to lateral the pigskin toward a halfback on a sweep, who missed the ball, and I was able to roll and cradle my body around the loose ball, recovering a fumble and ending another drive toward our goal.
But it was too little. When the final horn sounded, we had lost 20-18. I remember wandering off the field toward our lockerroom underneath the stadium. As I found my home locker for the last time, the emotional response to that loss and all the effort for nothing, the experience of the last loss at my personal locker built under those stands at my alma mater, hit me, and I sat heavily down on the bench seat in my grass-stained uniform and wept deeply into my hands. As I sat there and cried, one of the defensive coaches who had been in the coach's box above the field during the game, came up to me and put his arms around my shoulders and tried to console me. He told me that my effort had been amazing. And I think he cried too.
The locker room was silent or nearly so. It was as if someone or something had passed on. Players struggled to remove their uniforms and pads and trudged off to the showers. I took a small bar of ivory soap and a white cotton towel and walked like a zombie to the showers. I know I showered and dried my body off and dressed in my street clothes. I know I walked the short walk from the deserted stands to my apartment after the game, but I don't remember any of it.
I do remember opening the door to the apartment I shared with four other athletes to find all of our parents sitting in chairs around the living room, sharing some time together as their sons arrived, one by one, from the field. I am sure I was the last one there. I remember cutting my eyes toward my parents and mumbling something about needing to lay down. My mother and father followed behind me to my room. I undressed and lay down under the comfort of the sheets and my blanket. My mother stroked my temples and said they would check on me later. I fell asleep.
Later, my parents came in and asked me if I wanted to go to eat with the group. I couldn't; I was aching and felt the flue symptoms that came from the release of so much adrenalyn and emotion. They left me in the dark of late October outside my windows and the comfort of my bed.
Only later did I recover enough to want to feed the hunger which my body had developed, which had been hidden from me by the warring of chemicals and electrical synapses running inside my body and my mind.
I have only had two other football games which caught me up so strongly. One game occurred when I was about nine years old, playing little league football in Atlanta. The other occurred in the third game of my senior year in high school at North Dekalb Stadium in Chamblee, Georgia. In the first one, we came away with a hard-earned victory against a team roughly our equal. In the second one, we played against the best team in Dekalb County, a team which would later find their way to the state championship against Thomasville High School sometime in December of that year. At the end of that game, the coaches drove us back to the parking lot on the north side of Dunwoody High School and back to the lockerroom. I pushed my forehead on the bus seat in front of me and moaned my misery in the hearing of the player in front of me. As the bus pulled into the Dunwoody parking lot, I exited and trudged back down toward lockerroom. Suddenly, all of the pain and misery of the evening welled up inside and spilled itself onto the pavement of the parking lot. After releasing the bile collected in my stomach during that game all over the parking lot at Dunwoody High School, I at least was named Dekalb County Defensive Lineman of the Week.
But this weekend in Virginia was the last chance to give everything in a game in such an effort. From here out my struggles would be more intellectual and academic. Only the opportunity to say goodbye to my parents on the Sunday morning following the game and the promise of the next weekend's trip to watch me play on the fields at Georgetown University offered any solace for my efforts on that gorgeous Autumn day in Lexington, Virginia.
This is what I remembered suddenly in the living room of a townhouse in Clinton, South Carolina on October 6, 2007. Just a brief moment's memory, but so many years to travel.
DNA
Restless ever
My chromosomes' journey began on a plain
Somewhere in southeastern Europe
Or perhaps in a forest in Skandinavia
Listening for the touch of wind
Signaling the end of Winter
And the rebirth of dirty, rough living
The rude struggle to another day
Subsisting off of pockets full of grain
Gathered on some sabbath to fuel the day's journey
Or a crude basket of fish
Lapped and heaved from the rough water
And with a stone ax I felled those trees
And plaited the flax until it fit my hand
And whipped the dumb animal forward
Always forward
To the west and the dying orange ball
Which pulled me on like another dumb animal
To the new life ahead
And the promises of other days
Little pieces plaited together
In a chain, two chains
Twisted together into one double chain
Moving forward.
My chromosomes' journey began on a plain
Somewhere in southeastern Europe
Or perhaps in a forest in Skandinavia
Listening for the touch of wind
Signaling the end of Winter
And the rebirth of dirty, rough living
The rude struggle to another day
Subsisting off of pockets full of grain
Gathered on some sabbath to fuel the day's journey
Or a crude basket of fish
Lapped and heaved from the rough water
And with a stone ax I felled those trees
And plaited the flax until it fit my hand
And whipped the dumb animal forward
Always forward
To the west and the dying orange ball
Which pulled me on like another dumb animal
To the new life ahead
And the promises of other days
Little pieces plaited together
In a chain, two chains
Twisted together into one double chain
Moving forward.
Saturday, October 6, 2007
Not so early morning
Saturday. All the blue hose are wandering around the lobby of the Hampton Inn, looking like they are trying to find their lives in a cup of coffee or a plate of egg casserole. I love watching people in such an environment in the morning. They either seem like zombies or way to cheerful for the hour.
I looked out the window this morning to discover the sky was grey and looked like rain. I wonder how warm it will get or if the sun will show itself in the afternoon. Cindy is still sleeping. I have eaten my breakfast and am now awaiting the rest of the party.
I guess I am one of those people who are way too cheerful in the morning. At least I try to stay quiet until everyone else catches up. I think I will go check on Cindy.
I looked out the window this morning to discover the sky was grey and looked like rain. I wonder how warm it will get or if the sun will show itself in the afternoon. Cindy is still sleeping. I have eaten my breakfast and am now awaiting the rest of the party.
I guess I am one of those people who are way too cheerful in the morning. At least I try to stay quiet until everyone else catches up. I think I will go check on Cindy.
Friday, October 5, 2007
The beginning of the weekend.
Boy, was that a round about trip from Griffin, Georgia to Clinton, South Carolina. I left the office around 11:00 a.m. and went to two different banks, making deposits and cashing check (1). When I was through, I went home, knowing that my wife had left the task of making the bed, mopping the kitchen floor and vacuuming the downstairs carpets. Since she had had about three hours to finish her preparations for our leaving, I assumed she would have had a bath and would have got her clothes and what-not together for the trip. Boy was I wrong.
Instead, she gave me my orders and hopped in the shower. I had already swapped cars at the garage, since we were leaving to travel in Cindy's car. When all the chores were completed and everything was in the car, including kitchen chairs Kate wanted to borrow for her apartment and two long formal dresses from which she would pick for a dance tonight.
Anyway, we both got in the car and I turned the key in the ignition. Unfortunately, the starter didn't start and the battery seemed dead. So I called the garage back and they promised to bring my other car and pick up the one with the dead battery.
An hour and one half hour later, the wrecker driver arrived with a wrecker and my car. I quickly transferred all of the items in Cindy's car, with the exception of the kitchen chairs, which would not fit. We were finally on the road.
Due to the lateness of the hour, Cindy suggested we go the back route past Athens and on to Clinton through the woods of Northeast Georgia and the country in the uplands south of Clinton.
We drove to Jackson and Monticello and on to Madison. I was followed by a sheriff's car for most of the route between Monticello and Madison. He exited the highway to enter onto Interstate 20 and we then got caught in the most bizarre traffic intersection on the south side of Madison, where the road from Covington and the road from Eatonton combine. We waited and waited and waited.
Finally, we made our way through town and headed toward Watkinsville and Athens. After an hour of driving, I found the bypass and wound down through traffic until I found Georgia 72. This would be the last road to Clinton. We turned off and followed the 72 signs through little Georgia towns, across Lake Richard B. Russell, into South Carolina, through the oddly designed roads of Abbeville and the urban blight of Greenwood, South Carolina. Finally, we arrived in Clinton and delivered the dresses to Kate.
Tonight we sleep in the big beds of Hampton Inn, Clinton. Tomorrow, Homecoming for PC alumni, a game for us, and a corsage for Kate. Later we will eat supper, probably in Greenville, and attend church in Clinton, probably at First Presbyterian, and head back to Georgia. These are our plans, short as they are. Go Dogs! Go Generals! Go Blue Hose!
I am very tired.
Instead, she gave me my orders and hopped in the shower. I had already swapped cars at the garage, since we were leaving to travel in Cindy's car. When all the chores were completed and everything was in the car, including kitchen chairs Kate wanted to borrow for her apartment and two long formal dresses from which she would pick for a dance tonight.
Anyway, we both got in the car and I turned the key in the ignition. Unfortunately, the starter didn't start and the battery seemed dead. So I called the garage back and they promised to bring my other car and pick up the one with the dead battery.
An hour and one half hour later, the wrecker driver arrived with a wrecker and my car. I quickly transferred all of the items in Cindy's car, with the exception of the kitchen chairs, which would not fit. We were finally on the road.
Due to the lateness of the hour, Cindy suggested we go the back route past Athens and on to Clinton through the woods of Northeast Georgia and the country in the uplands south of Clinton.
We drove to Jackson and Monticello and on to Madison. I was followed by a sheriff's car for most of the route between Monticello and Madison. He exited the highway to enter onto Interstate 20 and we then got caught in the most bizarre traffic intersection on the south side of Madison, where the road from Covington and the road from Eatonton combine. We waited and waited and waited.
Finally, we made our way through town and headed toward Watkinsville and Athens. After an hour of driving, I found the bypass and wound down through traffic until I found Georgia 72. This would be the last road to Clinton. We turned off and followed the 72 signs through little Georgia towns, across Lake Richard B. Russell, into South Carolina, through the oddly designed roads of Abbeville and the urban blight of Greenwood, South Carolina. Finally, we arrived in Clinton and delivered the dresses to Kate.
Tonight we sleep in the big beds of Hampton Inn, Clinton. Tomorrow, Homecoming for PC alumni, a game for us, and a corsage for Kate. Later we will eat supper, probably in Greenville, and attend church in Clinton, probably at First Presbyterian, and head back to Georgia. These are our plans, short as they are. Go Dogs! Go Generals! Go Blue Hose!
I am very tired.
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