The New York State of Mind

Thanksgiving is one of my favorite holidays...when I ponder the thought, any holiday connected to food works for me. It felt especially good to be home, albeit the Saturday after Turkey Day. No harm done, there was plenty of left over bird and it works well in the microwave. Also, on the menu, Cheryl prepared one of my favorite dishes of pasta which is a combination of broccoli and sun dried tomatoes in extra virgin olive oil topped off with pine nuts. Not taken for granted was a chance to sleep in a house with four walls and roof, a welcome change. The run was a long one, at 33 days out.

Sunday morning was reserved for church at my hometown Providence Presbyterian and the lighting of the first candle of Advent. Judge James filled in on the keyboards for musical director Lisa Baty. After a month away, it was so good to see my church family and Pastor Joe Brice. Pastor Joe is a jovial southern gentleman who beams light everywhere he turns. When I greeted him in the reception line after the service, he emphatically warned me that if I was going to San Diego, he was coming along. He didn't sound like he was kidding.

Wednesday arrived and just like that, home time was over. One last Ghurka shaggy at the local cigar lounge in Hiram and out into the grand abyss of expediting we go. With smoke in hand, the phone chimed "The Price is Right" theme which signaled the company was calling with a load opportunity from Huntsville, Alabama to Syracuse, New York. 1,151 miles of pavement. Not a bad way to start this trip out. Pick up was scheduled for the next day...so I get to spend another magical night at home with those four walls and a roof. Luck be a lady tonight!

The next morning, Cheryl was up and out early to take our canine son, Louie to the vet for his annual checkup and a teeth cleaning (yes, he gets dental too) along with TJ, one of his feline sisters for a check of her own. The load was scheduled to be picked up at 6:00 pm, three travel hours away, so that meant there was plenty of time for a breakfast of a fluffy ham and cheese omelet combined with warm cornbread baked in my Grandmother's one hundred year old iron skillet. I could do this every morning for the rest of my life...yikes! Give me a mouth full of egg and Johnnycake and happiness sets in. Wash it down with good old 8 O’clock java and put a period at the end of that scenario.

Run number one on this trip was a nighttime start, but that's ok, I had enough rest to do it comfortably. With load onboard, GPS pointed the Fat Cat (my new nickname for the truck because she has a huge 500 HP Caterpillar motor) to I-65 North out of Huntsville through Nashville, Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, Buffalo and east on the New York Thruway to Syracuse.

In Upstate New York, there is no sign of autumn. Here, it is done. Dead, gone buried. I couldn't spy one solitary leaf, even on the ground. The trees up here are bare. I mean bare to the point that makes you wonder if there were ever leaves on them in the first place. The grip of winter is at hand in this Finger Lake region. I saw DOT depots along the way with mountains of what appeared to some sort of cinders and those dome-like huts for what I believe is the ever lovin' salt. Up here, winter doesn’t assault the local citizenry, they assault it. Like Desert Storm, they confront it, contain it and defeat it. The plows in the arsenal are enormous...they look like the bows of ships. The Snowmeisters just don't plow one side and turn around a come back the other way like every other genteel little community in the North. No, the massive snow movers here are positioned on the center line and both sides are cleared at once. They don't fool around with frozen precipitation up here. Move it out of the way, get out of the way, here we come. Snow days for the school kiddies? No way. That notion provokes a hearty laugh in these parts. Watertown, north of Syracuse is one of the snowiest towns in America. Forget about inches, they measure annual snow fall in yards. Now there's a place for a one horse open sleigh...make that mule team open sleigh.

My old friend Bob Raunec from New Jersey lives up here now and we met up for coffee on Friday night. I hadn't seen Bob in a long time. Times sure have changed, coffee on a Friday night, imagine that. I couldn't have fathomed that residing in the land of twenty-something years ago. Friday nights were reserved for swilling beverages of barley hops and malts or some other concoction in celebration the weekend. Today, Bob looks good with silver hair and beard in our land of fifty-something. I've always said “never complain about hair color, retention is half the battle.” I can vouch for it, having lived with a follicle deficit for years. But, after all this time, I wouldn't even begin to know what to do with hair. We talked about good old days, ailing parents, the present and future. I learned about the passing of our old friend Jerry Johnson who left us a year ago February. A massive heart attack took him to the Promised Land. Jerry was one of the best. He would do anything for anybody and include the shirt off his back. Rest in peace, old friend, I'm sure you have a great seat upstairs. There has to be a special place reserved for people like him.

Now, it's Saturday in Syracuse and the sky looks like a snow sky...a bit of it is in the forecast. I'm taking inventory of my winter wear and checking on my tire chains. It's a good thing this truck has a stout inter axel differential on my drive wheels. That means when I flip a switch, the wheels won't spin in a slippery situation, but ice is ice and so the winter season begins. Laredo and Brownsville look real good right now. Even that zoo of a truck stop in Ontario, California seems appealing. But, until then, I'm in a New York State of mind.