drinkin' and drivin'

On Sunday I had to get out of town--gas prices be damned--so I drove to the other side of the mountains to my favorite bar where I hooked up with one of my favorite barflies. He had been wanting to see me but didn't know where I was; the last he knew, I was still in Mexico. "Where is Antonia when I need her?" he lamented to his fellow barflies.

Let his tale of woe be a lesson to all of us.

A year ago his wife was driving home after having some after-work drinks and she drove into another car. No one died but everyone, including her, was seriously injured. A quarter million dollars later my friend's wife is in prison, sentenced to three years. I guess that at the hearing she entered a guilty plea and right then and there she was cuffed and hauled away, no time to say good-bye to her husband or her child. That was in March. My friend and his daughter were not allowed to visit the wife/mom until a week ago.

This is your normal hard-working family. No drug or alcohol abuse. Just one night of not correctly gauging her alcohol level and WHAM! lives changed.

Arizona does not fuck around with drinkers and drivers. Another woman known in those parts got five years for the same thing, her sentence longer because she happened to run into the sheriff's daughter who might or might not have been drinking herself.

I spent the night with my friend. We took a bottle of wine and a large pizza up to his house where I got to meet his very sweet daughter and I got to listen in on their jail-house phone call with the wife/mom. We sat outside and watched the bats dive-bomb the hummingbird feeders and listened to the coyotes singing their hearts out. I was glad I could be with my friend and his daughter. They're both doing well but it's not been easy. What is it like to walk into your home and the person you love is no longer there? Whether in jail, or worse, dead because of someone's carelessness? (I know, that's too gentle a word but how can I throw stones...?)

I'm not one to get shit-faced but certainly there were times when I drove home when I shouldn't have. I would justify it by thinking I don't have far to go and I'll only be on the frontage road. Yeah, that's what my friend's wife thought, too. Well you can bet your sweet ass those nights are long gone.

This little two-day road trip confirmed my desire to live out in the middle of the desert where coyote songs are a nightly lullaby. The trip also brought me back to reality: My yearning to return to The Home of Dashed Hopes has been dashed. Although getting spruced up, it is still a sad and sorry trailer park.

Throughout my life I have never moved back to a place once I left it and so I will not be returning to my old trailer park and probably not to that part of Arizona. Instead, I will keep going forward, anxious to see what's around the next bend.