The Trip, She Ended

 

by Pa Rock

Weary Traveler

Rosie and I arrived safely back at The Roost just north of West Plains, Missouri, at around one p.m. this afternoon following a nearly five-hour drive from the Kansas City area.  Mercifully, the drive was totally uneventful.

Rosie spent the past week with my son and his family in the Kansas suburbs of Kansas City where she learned to exert her Dominant Chihuahua over Jack, the playful Black Lab.  She did well, but was very happy when I finally showed up yesterday evening just as the sun was going down. (I should have been back three hours before the sun went down, but don't get me started on airlines, airports, and flying!  There will be plenty of time for all of that later.  When I do get started cranking that out of my system, after some serious decompression time, I will begin by sharing a letter that I am already composing in my head to Secretary Pete!)   My final flight anywhere will be a roundtrip to Oregon next month, and after that I will walk!

While Rosie was in Kansas City teaching Jack how to behave in polite society, I was in Goldsboro, North Carolina, enjoying all of the artistic commotion that comes with putting on a play.  I had already done "my part" by writing the danged thing, so basically all I had to do was sit and be entertained - which I did - and was.  I've said it several times in this space already, but the cast and crew of "The Shine from Dead Man's Bottom," did a superlative job of bringing that hillbilly comedy to life!  Thanks so much, Spotlight Theatre Company!

It rained, sometimes heavily, just about every time that I stepped outside in North Carolina, so I wasn't able to explore much.  Basically I just drove three streets:  Spence (where my hotel was located), Ash (which cut across town), and Central (the home of  the Paramount Theatre).   

I had read on the internet that when Andy Griffith lived in Goldsboro as a young adult in the 1940's and taught at the local high school, he stayed in a house at the corner of Audubon and Mulberry.  One afternoon as I was working my way across town on Ash, it quit raining for a few seconds and I noticed that I was crossing Audubon.  I turned right onto Audubon, but the street seemed to end in a couple of blocks, so I turned around and drove back across Ash heading the other direction - where I found Mulberry about two blocks beyond Ash.  The intersection of Audubon and Mulberry had two homes that could have provided a room to the young teacher, but neither had any sort of marker to commemorate that historical tidbit, and one of the yards needed mowing so badly that it made me homesick for my own yard back in Missouri.

That search for Andy's home was my only foray into pure tourism while I was in town.

(West Plains, where I live, was home to several entertainment and sports figures, and each has a street named after them - save one.  We have a very busy "boulevards" named after the likes of Porter Wagoner, Preacher Roe, and Bill Virdon - and even an "expressway" for singer/songwriter Jan Howard, but there is nothing in town to commemorate television and screen legend Dick Van Dyke who was born here to an unwed mother staying in town with relatives nearly a century ago.  Was it the circumstances of his birth that has kept the patriarchs and matriarchs of West Plains from recognizing their most famous son?  Enquiring minds would like to know?)

I'm rambling, of course, but what better place to do it that in my own "Ramble!"

It's good to be home!