My Journey

 (The Last Drops of Lyons) I had just gotten fired the day before.  I clearly hadn't done my research quite enough when I accepted the job in February of 2014 at a small, inner-city trades school.  Seemed like it 'could' have been a good decision at the time, but oh boy.  Working for a what I would best describe as a boatload of serial misfits led by a humorless sociopath, when I let HR know about two weeks' earlier that I was to have a change of address, my misanthropic supervisor took the opportunity to 'let me go' the day before our move.  Great. But, man, I was still excited and optimistic about the move itself!  After 11.5 years in the 'old house', I saw the move in many ways as a restart for my family and I; so many things had occurred in our former house, most notably was the fact that my first wife, Kim, after waging war against a cancer for over a year, died in our front room two days after bringing her home from the hospital.  We had only bee...

                                                                    It likely started as a small kid when we took trips to Tennessee and Kentucky each summer from our home in Kansas City.  Something about packing clothes, then often leaving pre-dawn, smelling the fumes of the diesel trucks on the highway, watching the Stuckey billboards go by.  Or, maybe it was when I was the 'navigator' of our big 2-week trip out west when I was 13.  Dad often would have me scour the Rand-McNally atlas, or the smaller, accordion-like folded state maps, for the next highway junction as we drove our Champion motorhome from Chicago to Montana, hitting iconic sites along the way:  The Great Corn Palace in South Dakota; Deadwood and Mount Rushmore, SD; swimming in the KOA campground pools (often eyeing and chatting up ot...