Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Sail away

Part of my quiet time ritual in the mornings is to check my mother's blog. Unlike me, she actually posts nearly every day and I enjoy seeing where she is and what she is doing.

Yesterday as I was preparing my bus I heard a song from the band "Styx". I remembered if from my youth, I do believe I had it on an album, or maybe an 8-track. (If it was an album, I probably still have it, sitting next to my record player in the workshop)

Anyhow, part of the lyrics go:

"I look to the sea, reflections in the waves spark my memory
Some happy, some sad
I think of childhood friends and the dreams we had
We live happily forever, so the story goes
But somehow we missed out on that pot of gold
But well try best that we can to carry on"

It was not waves that sparked my memory, but that song, and my mother's adventures. I remember my sister, myself, and the neighbor hood children riding our bicycles down to Whiting motors. At that time, they sold RV's on their little lot as well as new Chevies and other used vehicles. For a while they left the RV's open, and we kids liked to look inside. We were good kids, we didn't do anything a grownup wouldn't have done, looked in cabinets, kicked the tires, normal "looking at RV" type of stuff. Just like many adults we also dreamed of someday owning the RV and traveling around. We could not wait until we were old enough to drive. We were going to graduate from highschool, buy our RV, and Amy, Bridgette, Cliffy, my sister, and I would travel the country side. So as we looked at our RV's, we would claim our beds, make sure the fridge would hold enough pop for our journeys, made sure it had a toilette (though none of us were too worried about having a shower or a bath).

It wasn't too many years before Whitings started locking the RV's. Maybe other kids weren't so nice to them. Then they stopped selling them altogether. We continued to grow, and continued to make plans together. Then somewhere along the lines we started to drift apart.

We all lived on the same street. We all lived within a hundred feet of each other. But there were age differences that as we grew older, a year or two made it 'uncool' to be around your childhood friend.

So we all graduated and went our separate ways, searching for our pot of gold.

Or most of us did.

I remember Amy going down a different path then the rest of us. I know that she had a child as a teenager, that her parents raised. Then I stopped seeing anything of her at all. On a trip back to Montana at some point, I heard that she was missing and presumed dead.

More from Styx:

"A gathering of angels appeared above my head
They sang to me this song of hope, and this is what they said
They said come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me
Come sail away, come sail away
Come sail away with me"

Searching for a common name like Amy Johnson, is pretty difficult these days. Google it and you will find several hundred thousand people....

So I am hoping Amy found her pot of gold, and the rest of us will continue to carry on.

Now I get to do another blog experiment......


1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey MountainMan, I can see I'll have to take blog lessons from you! Nice little add-in today.

The memories made me smile big. I too remember the RV's 'the gang' was going to travel in. I'm thinking you liked a big fifth wheeler and everyone had picked out their own bed and you all had places in mind to travel to.

V4Vagabond (M4Mom)