The return of the dead.....or back from my trip.

At the 40th Andrews High School reunion, with me on the left, Danny Smith (owner of D group design and advertising firm out of Dallas Texas) and Eugene Solomon. Some friendships never change, and I am glad for that. Also I took these photos from a friends facebook page...since I didn't have my camera. So photo credit to Dorothy Coon Blanks.
Me, in profile...and again with Danny Smith, also at the table best friends Cheryl and Don McDonald. Again the great friendships never change. I hadn't seen Don and his wife for probably close to thirty years....and it seemed like we fit back together like a puzzle. Good times. We partied til 5:30 one morning. We just might be a bit old for that!!!! yikes. We knew we were in trouble when we went outside for a smoke and a gin pole truck driver staying at the same hotel exited his room and in good old West Texas fashion grunted 'morning' as he passed us. Don looked at his watch and said it was 5:30....ha. Amazing.
Also not all play. Worked some on the KiGor sequential story for Moonstone. Does the tune 'Running thru the Jungle' come to mind. ha.
Also a sketch for a new Lightning Legionnaire. He wrote me while I was out of touch. So as my mother's guilt always lives with me. He will receive this sketch when I mail his package out today.

When I was a kid, my dad would drive the Andrews Tx to Wymore Ne. trip in a day. My youngest son has done it a couple of times. Well my return trip I did it. Whew, it took me sixteen hours. I don't see well at night anymore so after the sun set I had to slow down. Plus I still don't like driving at night since I hit that deer last year. Shell-shocked I guess.

Well after driving all that time and way, I pulled around the house and in my headlights was Misty....one of the horses. All of them were out and enjoying the grass in the yard. They had pushed thru the corral and gotten out. I think they were out most of the day, but I don't know for sure. Anyway, with my landlords help we got them back in the corral after a couple of hours since they went across the road onto other property and we had to find them in the dark.

So yesterday was a day of rest and recoop. Today I am moving around a bit faster and getting a few things done.

So like a zombie movie, I am recovering from driving over 2000 miles, sleeping in terrible hotels, getting plastered at the reunion, taking the grandkids to the Confederate Air Force museum, sorry I just can't call it the Commemorative Air Force, and visiting with my eldest son and his family.....I am beat.

But I had a fantastic time. Still don't look at it as a vacation. Seemed I was always on the go and no time for much of anything like thinking or writing or drawing.

It was great to see the old town and school....and all my friends from then. They even have my name carved in stone on a war memorial of all who served from the town. Even my older brother showed up. I thought about ' this is where my imagination comes from'. And that gave me alot to think about. Especially on the road back.

If you have never experienced west Texas, it is a strange place. I mean that in a landscape kind of thing. The horizon is as flat as a drawing board and there is an amazing amount of sky overhead. Especially the part of west texas that are on what is know as the Caprock. This is a prehistoric plateau which was a huge coral reef like during the devonian age. As a kid once I found this out it gave the place a magic quality. And being a plateau, altho not very high, I always felt with just a thought away I was on a place like Challenger's Lost World. To me it was a place filled with monsters and demons. The surface rock was pure white, the soil nothing but bright red sand like the sands of Burrough's Mars. Outside the reach of town's lights we lived and at night the millions of stars were a sight to see. It was amazing.

It may take me awhile to process all that again. But it fuels my imagination as no other place on earth. There are rifts as strange as Angor Wat, sands as red as Mars, and a night sky that would set any science fiction writers description of the galaxy to shame.