1/17/13

As promised, the Odessa trip story.  Mom and I drove to Odessa and back… the end.  Ok, there is more… mom, Aunt Margaret, and I drove to Odessa and back.  Alright!  I'll go into more detail… but it really isn’t that interesting.  Monday morning at 0500 h I awoke to a beeping sound.  I got up to investigate.  It sounded like mom’s alarm going off.  The fact that it didn’t wake her worried me more than a little.  I knocked on the door to see if she was still with us.  She groggily answered and I told her that her alarm was sounding.  She still didn’t know what was what.  Eventually she was awake enough to realize what was going on and shut off the beeping.  I went down to feed the cat.  I slipped back into bed but didn’t go back to sleep.  Around 0545 h I got up for good.  I took a shower, shaved my teeth, and inserted my eyes then went to pack for the trip.  We were supposed to pick up Aunt Margaret between 0830 and 0900 but were ready to go by 0730 h.  We went ahead and headed her way.  “She’ll be sitting there,” mom assured me, “reading a book waiting for us.”  She was not.  We had to wait for her to shower and get ready to go.  Meh, whatever.  We were on the road by 0800 h.  That Lincoln is a fine cross-country driver… it is no Dodge Magnum, but it was quite nice.  Have I ever mentioned how John and I took the Pimpmobile to Oklahoma City and when we got out of the car there couldn’t believe we’d been driving for four hours?  Yeah, it was THAT good over the road.  Anyhoo, we headed west on I-20 in the Lincoln.  Mom kept asking Aunt Margaret if she needed a rest stop.  She, AM, kept saying she’d let us know.  At about Ranger she said she’d like to take the next rest area… but was in no hurry.  I decided I wanted a breakfast burrito from McDonald’s and stopped in… Eastland, I believe.  I scarfed down a couple burritos while they peed and we headed back out.  Around noon we rolled into Big Spring and had lunch with Jean-Ann Farley… a name I don’t expect anyone to recognize unless my siblings are reading the blog now… and if so, I apologize for any offensive things I may have said in the past in here.  As for the rest of you… feh, we’re moving on.  The Big Spring to Midland leg of the journey was just as uneventful as the beginning so we’ll now stop in at Uncle Harold and Aunt Mary’s place.  We chatted with Aunt Mary for a while, Uncle Harold being out at the time, then decided we’d like to find a place to stay in Odessa.  We left with the plan being we’d find a motel then come back to Midland for dinner with Uncle Harold and Aunt Mary.  We rolled the last forty miles or so to Odessa and found rooms in a La Quinta on Business 20 just west of the cemetery.  We all rested in our rooms until 1700 h when we headed back to Midland for dinner.  Now, Uncle Harold is beginning to suffer from Alzheimer’s so he got to meet me several times during the evening.  T’was quite a bummer.  We went back to the motel and called it a day.  Tuesday morning it was 21° outside and we were supposed to have a grave-side service at 0930 h.  We headed to the cemetery at 0900 h and waited.  Eventually a church bus showed up and Dave, the son of the deceased, came to tell us that we’d be having the grave-side service in the bus.  We did, it was nice.  After that, we were dismissed until the church service at 1130 h.  I asked if we could look for my paternal grandparents’, and Aunt Kay’s graves.  Mom knew approximately where they were and when I saw the gravestone “Snodgrass” I knew we were close.  I remember back in the seventies, my brother Ted pointing out that stone after Mom White’s funeral saying, “Look!  ‘Booger-weed!’”  I knew we were close.  Aunt Margaret and I got out to search.  Eventually we found them and made mental note of the location… which, of course, I will have forgotten if I ever make it back out to Odessa.  From the cemetery we went back to the motel for a bit.  We checked out and headed for the church.  We were way early so we took a tour of old homesteads in that part of town.  We went by the house I remember Arch and Norma living in.  It was… well, I was going to say much smaller than I remember, but it really wasn’t.  I did recognize it though… I’m going to claim that I recognized it before mom and Aunt Margaret, but that might not be 100% true.  From that house, we sought out the house we lived in at the time.  I was three when we moved away from that house, I have literally ONE memory of it… ok, one vivid memory and a vague sense of something like a memory… of that house.  I remember Arch and Norma’s better.  It is kooky.  We went back to the church and sat down.  When the organ began to play, she was hitting low notes that bordered on “Sensurround!”  Ok, now I'm going to make a “pop” culture reference that John and Pat will get, but I doubt anyone else will.  L’Trimm would have loved a car that could reproduce those notes.  Anyhoo, the service was nice and we took our leave as soon as it was over so we could drive home.  We stopped at a Whataburger in Midland for some lunch then rolled east on I-20.  Mom and Aunt Margaret slept most of the way and around… Eastland, I believe, I decided I needed to get out and walk.  We stopped at a McDonald’s… the same McDonald’s as the trip out it seems, purely by accident too.  Eventually we got home and, as I said yesterday, now we are back at work.  So, that’s it.  Have a day.