a story of miles #3

Following the divorce, I stayed with my friend Kate at her house in Milwaukie, Oregon for a month before finding on line and moving into a room in a house in Encinitas, California. One of my worst living experiences – wild drug and alcohol use, 100,000,000 ants crawling daily on my floor, wonky hardly-ever there internet. While there, though, I applied for and was hired by a San Diego agency to serve as a “support person” for a young couple, both with Down syndrome, in their apartment in San Marcos. From Encinitas I could take back roads to hang out with Kristen and James, maybe 20 miles round trip, two days a week.

Then I fled the insanely expensive and rather evil Encinitas house and landed in a room in a condo development in the Golden Hill neighborhood of SD, a much nicer experience for half the cost. The one drawback was the new commute to work with the kids:

About 35 miles each way, up the 163 and up the (gulp) 15 and west on the (another gulp) 78, SD to SM. I worked Mondays and Tuesdays as my role in the support team, so up and back twice a week, like 140 miles, and for seven months – Calculator please: just under 4000 of those 26,869 miles I’ve traveled in my car.

One morning after those nine months – and the joy of being some kind of service – came to a close, I called my boss and said I can’t do this commute anymore. She said she’d been waiting for my call. I gave three weeks and was gone

Driving to the Rhody Garden in Portland, OR brought me to a place of wonder and magic. The way longer drive to San Marcos was as fulfilling and joyful – lucky, lucky me. Fortunately, I get to follow their lives together on FB, and for some reason I am tagged in ongoing “support team” emails about that mid-thirties couple – in 2022 they’d been married four years and together 13. Wasn’t it that ancient Zen Master Eminem who said, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” and especially if you lead with the heart.

There’s a P.S. here about a guitar and and amplifier falling out from the sky into the room where I type this, but it’s another of these odometer tales for another day.

Lucky me: