Wrecking the Empty Nest

Driving out west and confronting all that open highway provided me the perfect opportunity to think about the years, where they went, why they fell in a mountainous heap and sifted through my fingers like the white, swift sands of time. We drove onward as the highway cut through red canyons, and Voila!....it's exactly a Thin Lizzy song.

Somewhere out there is buried treasure forgotten by Coronado, or so the legend goes. Rattlesnake paradise, real working cowboys and Texas Tech spirit permeates this area as Tech flags hang from abandoned buildings, small gas stations in these tiny, almost ghost towns dotting the way to the campus.

It's official – I'm an Empty Nest Person, emphasis on empty. I took my young, handsome, remarkably suddenly grown-up son (when did that happen???) and deposited him on the grounds of this massive institution.

We have been through much together. Baseball games, basketball season and lots and lots of football. I wondered where was that 11 year-old who used to whine for every Pokemon card he could get his hands on? Skateboards, hungry friends, sleepovers and Advanced Reading tests that he was always behind with. Poof! It's all over. Many things finished, yet the future looming as if it was just right over the big, orange streak lighting that western sky.

The move-in was as massive as the campus, kids everywhere, parents with carts, a mini refrigerator bonanza. All of a sudden, it's dinner time, then I'm hugging a young man towering over me who used to be the little boy tugging at my hand. It's ok, it's life, you know. He's not the first to grow up, he won't be the last. Soon (I hope), I will be out of my semi-sobbing state and on to other things in my life.

I look around the campus at the buildings rising up from that flat land, the library in the distance, and I think about books. And possibilities. I think of my own school days in the library on a cold November evening, and a research paper I didn't care about as I read snippets of great literature flowing like a grand paper fountain at a small table where I could look out at the cold dusk as little freezing droplets of water reminded me that I should get going.

Then I was back on that highway again going home. I was sad but also happily optimistic for my young man with the promise of a bright future unfolding like that wide open highway that connects me to my only son.

[embed width="123" height="456]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66pE67m_Hf4

Twillia Garvin's Birthday

August 17th   was Twillia Garvin's birthday. Twillia was a lovely southern woman, a hard working, resourceful wife, a loving mother, and a treasured grandmother. She was born a long time ago, but her influence has persevered through the years for those that loved and knew her. It was not long after the Civil War when her parents loaded up from Lumpkin County Georgia and headed west to Texas. Of course, I have often wondered why they chose this part of Texas to settle in, the flat, dry, almost treeless land of opportunity. The correct answer is that for all its simplicity, the part they picked was fairly good farming land for that time. Texas climate, in general, is a mixed bag that has always ranged from one extreme to the other. I have a very few treasured copies of letters that my grandmother wrote, and in one particularly bleak winter at some time in the 1920s, she describes a winter so cold that the cows were freezing to death in the pastures. So winter extremes along with this crazy summer heat is the place they choose as home.

Twillia was born in Texas and grew up in a family of girls. She married Henry Dixon Dunlap, and switched her residence to an even more desolate farm further west and lived a quiet life there helping my grandfather salvage what he could from that stubborn earth. They had only two sons and they were a year apart in age. World War II was on the horizon when my father signed up to go to war and his younger brother tagged along to do the same. The problem was that my Uncle Dale was not old enough to enlist, prompting my grandmother to fire off a letter to a Texas official referring to the federal government who apparently would not release Uncle Dale, as “The biggest liars I've ever heard!”

My grandmother was over sixty-years-old when I was born, so she was truly a grandma and not the chic, over-the-top stylish 40-something, 50-something Glammas that we have today. I was only ten-years-old when we said goodbye; she had been called upward to enjoy a better existence, one without farm duty, raising two rambunctious boys, having to worry about cows in the snow or challenging the government to a war of words. My time with her was cut short, but I treasure those few years we had together and this day has always been special for me. Hats off to angels everywhere, and to kind, spunky folks that go about their daily lives and help make the world a bit better for the rest of us.