I lived in the Valley of the Sun most of my life. I was able as a child to walk barefoot on asphalt in heat upwards of 110° F. In 1989 I and my then-spouse bought a house near 19th Avenue and Bethany Home Road, and about a year later our daughter was born at Community Hospital, less than a mile away. The marriage lasted 23 years, but was only intermittently happy.
hello, toledo, ohio
where my sweetheart has taken me on as cohabitant
whence we came after traveling in a 2023 kia soul
named celeste
At 11:52 PM the night of July 3rd, 2026 I left my apartment for the last time; the leaseexpired at midnight. I and my sweetheart spentour last night in Phoenix at the Hampton Inn & Suites.The morning of July 4 we left Phoenix; near sundown we found ourselves in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, looking for authentic New Mexican Mexican food. My sweetheart stepped on a sort of grating with small round cutouts, her flipflop caught an edge, and she pitched forward onto her face most of the impact was absorbed by her right knee and her nose near its bridge. We ended up ordering pizza delivery from Pizza 9, a chain based in New Mexico. It was delicious.
Next evening, after driving halfway through the Texas Panhandle, we stopped for the day at Amarillo and had appetizer takeout from the Red Robin across the street from our hotel. The pretzel bites were goodbut aftera day of monotonous scenery of grass, wind farms, baled hay and occasional cows, we were too hypnotized to enjoy it much.
In Yukon, in metropolitan Oklahoma City, we had an unmemorable meal except for fried green beans while watching the U.S. soccer team fall to Belgium. The better team won, thank Goodness. That day we’d had nice cloudscapesand terrain that reminded my sweetheart Donna of her native Tennessee.
In Saint Robert, Missouri, near Lebanon, Donna and I had a DELICIOUS steak dinner at a place called Colton’s. We were a bit put off by the bad taxidermy of the trophy heads, though.
Next day was chaos and mishap. In Saint Louis sudden rain and an abrupt lane change lent themselves to a near collision, sending me into a narrow triangle of asphalt that was neither one lane nor the other, and only quick braking prevented a sideswipe. I did not shake, but was shaken.
Right past the stadium in Indianapolis the AI navigator announced a seventeen-minute slowdown, and gridlock prevailed. Just when it eased some came the news that a five-minute slowdown was imminent. It feels crawly to go from 70+ mph to less than a slow walk.
From then on, despite frequent lane closures and mowing and construction zones, driving was smooth. The “Welcome to Ohio” sign gave us a big boost. The “Highway 225/Toledo” turnoff was positively thrilling; and we rolled up our driveway before it was fully dark.
I hadn’t done an acrostic poem in a long time, so when I unearthed an old sketchbook with the beginnings of an acrostic page on it, I wondered if I still had the knack. So I spent the last hour filling the space between PASTE and BOARD, Putting images in the cards I’d drawn in 2023, and signing, dating and photo editing the page.
It rhymes, it scans metrically, but it is vague near-gibberish–OR it is the bare bones of an ingenious Murder Mystery that the reader is invited to concoct. Time will tell. 🙂
Soon I will move from Phoenix, Arizona to Toledo, Ohio. I want to have all my wordly possessions reduced to what I can fit into my 2023 Kia Soul, with my sweetheart and future cohabitant Donna in the passenger seat.
The problem: I have dozens of ceramic works, and eight cases of comic books. The comic books alone would take up most of the cargo space in my vehicle. Same with the ceramics.
The strategy: I will donate all but a very few of the comic books to Friends of the Phoenix Public Library. I will pack up the ceramics and take what I can. The rest I will preserve in two dimensions, digitally…and abandon.
An ancient proverb goes something like “In the course of a long lifetime, a wise man must be prepared to abandon his baggage several times.” This is one such time.
It is June 22, 2026. Eight days from now I will leave Phoenix with a car full of my possessions. I have decided to take at most a dozen of my ceramic works.
This a table of about half of my ceramic works. The more to the left you look, the more likely it is that a given piece will end up in the dumpster.
It is no tragedy. Most of the pieces were done in haste and are consequently flawed; and this photo preserves the ideas behind the pieces. If I do a “remake” of a piece, it is guaranteed to be better than the original.
It tickles me to think that an archeologist of the future might find my work in a landfill.
As the proverb has it, “In the course of a long lifetime a wise man will find it necessary to abandon his baggage several times.”
