Chapter 1: What's a small decision you made that ended up having a big impact on your life?

Originally written December 25, 2020

In the summer of 1975 I was recovering from a terrible car accident in which I broke my hip. I was planning to take a hitchhiking trip that August and see my buddy Green Bay Frank up in Wisconsin. I’d done that two years previously.

In those days, at least for some of us, hitchhiking was an acceptable way of travel — and recreation. Just two years before, I’d hitched from Albuquerque and visited friends in Fort Worth, Texas, Lawrence Kansas, Columbia, Missouri and Green Bay before turning west and seeing Mount Rushmore, Yellowstone Park and eventually San Francisco. So I was planning a similar, though shorter hitchhiking trip in August 1975.

That summer I was taking a summer school literature class studying Mark Twain (taught by the late Hamlin Hill, a nationally known Twain scholar) as well as working at the University of New Mexico Biology Department washing lab equipment with acid. (My official title was “Acid Washer,” which I thought cool and cosmic.)

One day after either class or work I was riding my bicycle back to my house on Georgia Street SE. Usually I turned off Central south on Richmond but this day I made a decision (that’s called “foreshadowing” over at the English Department) to go up a little further on Central. And a block or so later, I saw, getting out of her VW bug was my friend, Julie. I hadn’t seen her all summer. She’d been married to my friend Dave until earlier that year. Julie had gone back home to Birmingham, Alabama, while Dave moved in with me.

When I told Julie I was planning another hitchhiking trip, she said, “You should go to Birmingham. I’m heading back in a few days, but I’m just getting my stuff and moving back here.”

And so I did. I changed my plans. Goodbye Green Bay, hello Birmingham!

I took the long route, visiting friends in Kansas City, making my first trip to Austin and New Orleans.

And when I got to Birmingham, Julie introduced me to her friend Pam. We hit it off and after more than a year of being pen pals, she moved to Santa Fe to become my roommate, then my wife, then the mother of my daughter, Molly.

So had I not made that decision to take a slightly different route home from UNM that day, Molly would not exist.

(Below: A fuzzy snapshot of Julie and Pam, Birmingham, Alabama, August 1975)