Sidetracked Charley

  Charley was John Steinbeck's Standard Poodle. I first met Charley, and John Steinbeck for that matter, in Union Station in Los Angeles. It was the culmination of an escape from my college dorm with five friends and a Buick Special which threw a connecting rod just outside of Kingman, Arizona in the middle of the General Motors strike in Detroit. Over the years I have written many short stories about that adventure, toyed with making it a coming of age novel except only men seem to write those, named every computer, and half my journals or blogs Charley. I have also read all the John Steinbeck novels since that day I used some of the last of my travel money and bought the just out in paperback Travels with Charley.  If I had gone ahead with getting my masters I might have made my thesis about John Steinbeck's works.  I abandoned the masters when living with someone who was doing his masters on Moby Dick. That may be a portion of my life I need to examine more fully. It i...

Heading West There comes a point in every journey where the conscious person realizes it is not about the destination. As we left Las Vegas bound to drop Barb-from-Santa-Barbara off in Barstow I felt like Alice Through the Looking Glass. Penny had shotgun and I tried to sleep. I had not slept since before my last final, four hours before our departure. The trip could no longer be counted in hours but in images and flashing across my memory like slides shown in the backyard. Slides were after film and before digital. Dad was an avid recorder of our family adventures. He gave me a Kodak camera when I was eight and his Rolex when I went off to college. For some reason I left it back at the dorm as if this forbidden escape should not be recorded except in my mind. It it was. Each image recorded like a power point presentation with a caption. "Why Barstow?", I asked Barb as we got her bags out of the trunk at the railroad station there. "Because we moved here." ...

Welcome to Kingman Get Your Kicks on Route 66 Actually to be precise the Buick did not blow up in Kingman, Arizona but outside of Kingman. That particular day we saw Kingman three times. When we drove into the town on Route 66 just before dawn the car was knocking, and we again needed gas. Fortunately this time a station was open. There was no self serve in those days except for illegally siphoning it. You pulled in, waited for a gas jockey to make it out to your car, said fill it up with regular, and check the oil. Then we all made a dash for the bathrooms. They were always gross. But in the Route 66 days there were no rest stops with or without facilities. The attendant said the Buick was two quarts low. He added oil and some STP oil treatment stuff in case we had a crankshaft leak. The Buick was a year old and had just been serviced by the dealer in Albuquerque. We were all a bit road weary. Nobody questioned the information until the first long steep hill on the Califo...