cock-eyed,blind,and the end of the road !

old_truck

Originally uploaded by jayfherron.
I spent most of my life since the Navy working at finding jobs no one else would do…or no one else was at. I worked as a mortician until I became old enough to be licensed as a long distance truck driver and from 1975 on my jobs centered around big trucks. I ‘sailed the concrete seas’ as the old time truckers used to say. I confess that as a boy I loved the trucks and the sounds of trucks and if I came across a truck like this in the photo I’d spend every day there-thats where you’d find me.
It took forever to find some one who would teach you how to drive back in the 70’s-its not like that any more…but then and further back the truck drivers job was as prominant as the captain of a small ship. We never wore tennis shoes to drive a truck where I came from.
But the job did offer the solitude and independence I needed and so I spent most all of my working life doing it coast to coast and border to border. Driving a truck just like the one in the photo…except in better condition-and so my boyhood wants came to be after all.
Our life was as alone as this truck in the picture is ( and if this pic does’nt show up…) not the glamour once thought – the romance of the open blue highway. Oh it is romantic if you look at it in a certain way-like being in the northern parts of Utah and seeing the high and wide open sky at night and the trillions of stars that you can’t see like that any where else….or when I hauled cattle the mornings at the ranches and the cowboys in thier chaps and mounted on horses to round up each trucks load.
I had a stroke in 1998 on my way to Wisconsin to load a bulldozer for Oregan and boom…last day of that. It was Feburary 2 1998. Never saw my truck again.
I reacted to the stroke and its effects and fought back and regained a lot of things but my left side-my left eye and hand are sort of goofy. My left eye is blind and it appears now a days that I’m winking at everyone but its only that my eye has this wierd light in it so I favor that eye to block the light. Never the less…they took the trucks away-good thing.
An interesting thing happened the very day I had my stroke-all the way home in Florida new neighbors were moving into a house up on the hill near me. Nothing unusual about new neighbors-but these folks came with a history and once I write the details of this part of my life you’ll wonder what line I got in during sperm cell assignment to end up with the life I’ve had.
I have an interesting story to tell…the Navy thing and the rest of my life all trail along with the way my life is today. This computer machine is really the new thing-I am noviced so bad that it’d be safer to teach me how to skateboard…trying to learn what this and that is about and what not to do is as you must know not quite simple-but I’m getting there and can actually move fairly fast with only a right hand and I was’nt a typist to begin with-my left is to shakey. When I was a kid in DC I spent a lot of my high school days hanging around the Library of Congress. If you want to skip school and not have any one get curious…go to the Library of Congress. But it was there that I was able to continue to learn and used the place to my advantage many times. Funny-it is like a huge computer there-you hand the clerk a list of the materials you require and they assign you a seat and a dude with a cart comes around and delivers your requests right to you. So seeing my way around this computer is kind of like looking at a more refined Library of Congress.
So I am trying to make this thing work-to try to tell my lifes story to who ever sees fit to read it and to learn this computer bizz along with it.