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You Don’t Have As Much Time As You Think
When you’re young, you think that there will always be more time to do those things you love. You never know when it will be the last time for something. The problem is you only realize this through the foggy lens of time.
More than twenty years ago, my dad and I set out on a cross-country drive together. I moved from Norfolk, Virginia, to El Paso, Texas, to my permanent duty station at Ft. Bliss.
I was nineteen years old and, like most nineteen-year-olds, thought I was an adult. I had just graduated from the Armed Forces School of Music and was on top of the world. My folks came down to pick me up and bring my meager belongings home to spend a few days before heading off to the great southwest.
The time home was lovely, catching up with a few friends before saying goodbye, to some I would never see again. My grandmother was very sick, and the prognosis was not good — a strange and anxious time.
In February 1999, we left Mom and family behind and headed down the road. We planned to make it to a place called Knobnoster, Missouri, to Mom’s brother’s to stay for the night. On the second day, we would continue west, where we had a reservation at a hotel in Tucumcari, New Mexico.
Neither my dad nor I had been that far southwest before. We were excited to see what the southwest…
