Heading South

By the time you read this, I’ll have taken up residence in Russellville, Arkansas. Things have just become too much for me to deal with them alone in McCook and so I’m moving to where I have a support system in the personages of my two sons, Michael and Will, and my ex-wife Linda. I’ll be an hour and a half south of Will who lives in Fayetteville and a couple of hours east of Michael who lives in Tulsa. Either could come and help me out in a heartbeat if I needed them whereas now it’s over a ten hour drive for both of them.

As my friends and acquaintances know, my health has deteriorated significantly since my heart attack three years ago and, consequently, I have numerous maladies that I didn’t used to have, including blood flow in my legs, easy exhaustion and prostate issues. My ex-wife wants me there because since Michael moved to Tulsa, she’s alone and lonely all day and since I am too, the solution seems obvious.

My twenty five years here have been mixed with the good and the bad but more good than bad. That’s why I stayed when my initial idea was to teach at MCC while I looked for jobs elsewhere. The friendliness and helpfulness of the residents here made me feel so much at home that I never mailed out another resume after I got here. That feeling changed somewhat over the years but I guess no matter where you end up, it would have changed there too.

There’s one caveat to my moving and it’s a fairly big one. Linda and I have been divorced for over 20 years now and so only the Gods know whether we can share a house in a platonic relationship or not. She swears we can because we would both have someone to interact with plus we could see our boys anytime we wanted to but the last time I stayed a week with her, it wasn’t a very smooth outing at all.

On the other hand, once you move, you move and as quickly as apartments rent at Quail Creek, I’m sure there wouldn’t be one available for me if I decided to come back. Maybe it’s best that way because it’s easy to take the other option when one’s available but when it isn’t, you have to dig in your heels and do whatever you have to do to make things work, regardless of how hard a task it is.

I doubt that Bruce Crosby will ever know what life he pumped into me when he offered me a weekly column over 20 years ago but it has constantly been a bright spot in my life when sometimes there weren’t very many bright spots to look at. He interviewed me in his office twenty-something years ago, hired me on the spot and we’ve never looked back and I’m eternally grateful for that.

Of all the things I will miss about McCook, missing writing this weekly column will be right up at the top of the list.

I want to thank my friends for being my friends which is sometimes not easy to do in the political climate we’re forced to live in today. But where some of them laugh, diminish, and put down my Democratic politics, others don’t mention them at all even though some are a member of that other party too and that has been deeply appreciated by me. A friendship is based on much more than a person’s political leanings and some folks in McCook have proven that to me over and over. A member of our City Council has always called me her favorite Democrat and that has always meant a lot to me because she evaluates the whole person instead of just their politics.

I also want to give a big thank you to Dick Trail. We’ve been on opposite ends of the political spectrum for the whole time we’ve been writing columns but it never became mean or petty or personal. In fact, he went out of his way several times to compliment me on things I had written about and there’s nothing more rewarding than to have a person with opposite views from yours do that. I know that Dick will continue to write until he can’t write anymore and I wish him great success and longevity.

And finally, the greatest gift I received in McCook and I received it two to three times a year were my students. They’re the ones that made everything go around and brought everything together and for this I owe them a debt I could never repay. Not many people wake up on a workday with a smile on their face but I did every single day because I knew my students and I would interact once again the way we did every day. To each and every one of you, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.

For the rest of you, I humbly sign

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