I'm back

Nearly a year since I've done any regular work here. Sometimes I feel like Amy, who commented on DB

Wow, how earnest and clever I was. And how utterly moribund Biscuit is. Every day I think to post on it, and then someone cries or yells "MOM, I need a box cutter and some glue!" and the moment is lost...

about not being able to tend to her blog because of her other responsibilities.

I am in Knoxville, TN since about eight my time, Central Daylight, last night when I fueled up and parked the truck to wait for my Monday morning delivery. It's a bit tight here at one of the older and smaller Pilot truck stops on the west side of Knoxville along IH-40. After I fueled up I had to circle back out in the street, come back in the parking lot, and then I waited for another driver to squeeze his fifty three foot dry van into one of the only open parking spaces directly behind the fuel islands, and then he very kindly got out of his truck and "spotted me" to back into the space next to his truck. There is just barely enough room to do it, pulling up through the fuel island and backing up to "hit the hole" puts you within inches of several obstructions, various curbs which bruise the side walls of your tires, the fuel island pump, trucks in the adjoining parking spaces and all the while other trucks are backed up in the parking lot coming in to fuel and waiting for you to park. Once I had gotten my truck settled into the space I got out to thank the driver, Anthony, who helped me. Anthony and I talked about trucking and all manner of things standing in the parking lot from around nine Knoxville time until nearly midnight with one break to buy soft drinks. It's a solitary business this over the road trucking and personal face to face conversation of any merit does not come often nor last long. Last night was a very unusual occurrence, generally such conversations last only minutes and are pure ritual courtesy but in this case we hit it off for some reason. I know Anthony lives in Chicago on the lakefront downtown with his wife and children, some of his past work history back to Seattle, WA and that he is originally from a small town in Mississippi and he has a similar grasp of my life. It turns out that we are both veterans of the US Navy though our service dates a very far apart, he enlisted in 1989 and I enlisted in 1967. I never asked for Anthony's last name nor he mine and likely we will never see each other again, but if we do meet again, there will certainly be the basis for another friendly conversation of some depth. Anthony and I are both from the South. Perhaps it's a Southern thing not asking for nor giving a last name when you spend some time with another person in a chance meeting, it felt very familiar and comfortable to me. We both agree that cornbread has no white flour nor sugar, only coarse ground yellow corn meal, bacon fat, salt, soda and buttermilk. And, we both recalled having regular family meals, as children, of ham hocks, navy beans, sliced purple onions, chow-chow and, of course, cornbread. All this is generally served with chilled buttermilk, ice water or sweet tea, your choice and sometimes you have all three yourself in the course of the meal. I can't recall in detail all that we talked about standing in the parking lot for nearly three hours but it ranged from the best routes around the traffic in the major areas of congestion to parenting practices.

Now after a mile and half round trip by foot along the Turkey Creek Greenway to the Wal-Mart Super Center I'm blessedly back in my air conditioned truck where the air is down in the high seventies and relatively dry, outside at five this evening it is still in the high nineties and even though the NWS shows the relative humidity at under fifty percent it's still seems "wet" outside to me. Perhaps lumping my week's supply of groceries back to the truck just made me work a little harder than usual or it is just damp along Turkey Creek. You don't realize what a half gallon of milk, eight packs of yogurt, a half gallon of orange juice, a half pound of pepper cheese, a pound of crackers, two rolls of paper towels, a half dozen bananas, four apples and a few other odds and ends really weighs until you pack it three quarters of a mile over the blazing asphalt back to your house. Now it's time to attend to some tedious financial issues just like last year at this time. And then, naptime until about six local time tomorrow morning when I'll set out to cover the last six miles to my destination. Living in forty eight square feet is interesting especially when you realize that you have to get a bed, first and foremost, into that six by eight foot area. But the adjoining office is only a single pace away and it's a spacious thirty two square feet, four by eight feet, with a very nice picture window view on three sides, high up where you can see what's going on. Three years off the road and now a full year back on the road. Yes, I'm back.