Pater Familias … because I'm your FATHER!

On The Road Again - Pater Has An Assignment!

September 21, 2010

CHAMA, NM – Blogging behind the wheel by voice, with motel-room transcription and edit of words spoken into tiny digi-recorder on the road from Santa Fe to Wolf Creek Pass, Colorado.

US Rt. 84 runs through high range so much closer to the sky and bright than the green, green Unsuburb under its fuzzy East Coast sky.

Brief apology to Girl Child and Minerva – Last night, on the phone, I told a fib. It was perfectly true that I miss you guys and will be ready to get back home a few days from now. The fib, which I believe I spoke to GC, was that I wished you two were here right now.

Sorry, baby. I am so crazy glad to be out on my own, on the road, doing paid writing work, which I have missed and mourned since morphing from work-at-home dad with principal daytime parenting responsibilities to full time at-home daddying in a strange town that’s still pretty strange two years in.

Check it out, though. Today, 2,000-some miles away and a mile-and-a-half up, I can even smile upon the Unsuburb. Can’t blame it – can I? – for being miserable ‘cause I did so little of my chosen craft and made zilcho money.  

And the glorious Georgia O’Keefe scenics in this place arejust an amenity. I’d feel much the same driving from Youngstown to Toledo, if that rode led me to a feature story I was dying to write. Hallelujah, and praise the not-dead-yet magazine publishing industry, I’m doing what I love – and apparently really need – to do. I’m going to a place I’ve never been, to get next to people I don’t know and will never see again. Then, somehow or another, I have to make it feel right for them to talk to me like somebody they know. No, more than that – I have to let them say things they might not have said to anybody, because they never even thought such things until I showed up and provided encouragement.

The people happen to be in the ski industry, and I’m writing about them for a business magazine. The actually writing, I can tell, is going to scare the living sh*t out of me. I mean, more than two years is a long layoff, but I’ll take being scared, too.

Lots of impossibilities in my life. Here’s this one: A lazy guy who can’t stand not working.

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