My Bottom Hurts Have you ever had one of those days in Crestline in which you drive about a hundred miles without ever leaving the same four-square-mile area? Sure you have, I’m not the only one. I’ve waved to you 20 times a day sometimes as you drive by. If the insurance adjusters from our car insurance companies could be little flies on the dash when we do this and see the roads we drive on and how many head-on collisions we narrowly avoid when we do this, they’d triple our premiums. I probably drove a hundred miles or so in Crestline on Sept. 11 and only left the confines of the old Switzerland subdivision twice—the two times I visited the post office. In the morning I drove my daughter to Lake Gregory Elementary, where most all of the kids were wearing red, white and blue in honor of Patriot Day. I nearly got back to my house on Altdorf when I realized that I hadn’t checked the mail in four days and I had better get it before they started to put today’s mail in or there wouldn’t be room. So I went down to my post office box and yanked with all my might to get all of the stuff that was in there out of there. It must have weighed five or six pounds. By the time I was done at the trashcan in the post office, I carried out one bill and a thank you card from a friend. Too bad, I could have had about $200,000 worth of credit cards if I would have kept it all, because I was pre-approved for every bit of it. It wasn’t 15 minutes later that I was heading back downtown to go to Goodwin’s to get some kind of breakfast-type food so I didn’t have to eat a ham sandwich or frozen burrito or something for breakfast. To make a long story short, I went to Goodwin’s no less than five times that day. The second time I got steaks, potatoes and corn-on-the-cob, thinking how I was going to grill them later on the barbecue. Of course, I found later that I was out of charcoal. Then after I got the charcoal, guess what? No aluminum foil. You can’t do the potatoes and corn without the foil. By the time I got the foil it was getting late, so I was almost thinking of calling Cappelletti’s and saving the grilling for the next day, but driving is just so much fun. Some people who worked at Goodwin’s kept looking at me weird because I kept coming back. They were probably wondering whether I was shoplifting things or something. But I went other places on Sept. 11 too. I had to pick up my daughter at 2:15 p.m. at the school. On the way back, we noticed two things: people standing on the corner of Lake and Lake Gregory with signs supporting the troops, and as we went up Lake Gregory Drive, there were three great blue herons on the south beach together. I had a photo assignment in that area at 3 p.m., so I went home grabbed my camera and came back. When I got back to the lake there were four great blue herons there together, a sight I have never seen here. I took photos of the three women standing out there in their gesture of support getting lots of hoots and honking horns. Just I was taking their pictures, a young man came up to them, shook their hands to thank them for their support, and said he had just returned from Afghanistan. I thought, “Wow, how fortunate for me to be here at this moment—makes the story even better.” So I snapped some photos of him shaking their hands. After he talked to them of his exploits I started interviewing him for a story. I said I had heard that he just returned from Afghanistan, and he said “Yeah, I spent a year in Iraq, and then a while in Afghanistan.” I thought that maybe he had just gotten it backward. So I asked him what his rank was, and he said “five.” I said, “You mean E-5?” He answered, “Yeah E-5.” I said, “So you were a sergeant, then.” He answered, “Yeah, a sergeant.” Then I asked, “I heard you say you blew up caves and fed people, so what was your MOS?” He asked, “My what?” I said, “What was your job number, were you an engineer?” And guess what? By golly, he was an engineer! You know, I’ve been doing this journalism stuff so long that I don’t really need to interview people anymore. My last question was, “So what was your unit?” He asked, “What do you mean?” I almost yelled, “What were you stationed with?” He said, “Oh I was in nuclear explosives.” I just said, “OK dude,” shook my head and walked away. What I couldn’t believe is that the guy was going to let me do a story on him and publish it in the paper along with a photo. The women kept having an animated conversation with the young veteran for a few minutes, and then he left in the direction of the bars downtown. I walked back up to one of the women and said, “You know the guy is full of it don’t you?” She cocked her head and looked at me as if to say, “Du-uh!” She added, “Yeah, I hear he tells people that story so they’ll buy him beers.” One can only hope that one day he tries it on a few real Afghanistan veterans who have already had a few. Oh yeah, I was writing about driving. By the end of the day, my posterior hurt, my back was sore, my legs were stiff, and I knew that I was going to have to work all day Saturday to make up for all of the billable hours I squandered driving around in my car all day. At least it was scenic and eventful and I got to meet interesting people. Not like the kind of day in which you’re working on a home improvement project and you drive straight back and forth 20 times to and from the hardware store getting things you need. Where’s the fun in that? |
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