I grabbed a backpack in 1987 and then headed east from Central Texas towards Atlanta, Georgia in search of the same thing I was looking for when moving from my hometown a few years earlier. The same thing that we all, at one time or another search for, and usually find, if not then, shortly afterwards, before finally realizing that we already have true happiness; whether it be in the form of a better job, the right city to live in or a career change.
So I left Southeast Texas, where I was born, in Beaumont, a few years earlier, and moved to Austin, in Central Texas, hoping that I would find it there. I would then move from there (Austin) to Atlanta, Georgia, the very next year, then back to Austin, and from there to San Francisco, California, somewhat setting the pace for the journey ahead.
Although I never truly had an innate desire for math (Though, who truly knows?) , a year after leaving my hometown, Beaumont, Texas, in 1986, after enrolling as a student of psychology at the local university after earning a football scholarship along with a few other of my friends; that year we won the Class 5 A Football State Championship (which is for the largest schools in Texas) . I had moved about two-hundred and fifty miles away to Austin, Texas, where I would continue my studies. But a year after that, in 1987, I found myself at Phillips Business College of Atlanta, Georgia as a student of Accounting. After moving there and getting somewhat settled, along with a small group of other people from Atlanta and different parts of Georgia, we ended up making an honest attempt at becoming young and aspiring accountants. Margaret went into Tourism, a young lady whom we signed up with and shortly afterwards, we became friends with, while myself, Reggie and Karla went into Mr. Hicks’ class, trying to figure out what went into the columns of debits and credits, which makes more since today, though it did then also. Typing sixty-five words a minute under a professor, who, while in the military could type one hundred words a minute. Along with debits and credits, friends that I hope went on to do well, a sweet kiss from Karla before heading to Chamblee, where after getting off of the train, one could see, in the distance, Stone Mountain. I would then transfer to a bus that would take me few a miles up the road where I worked at K–Mart as a sporting goods salesman, selling hunting and camping equipment: shotguns, rifles, ammunition and knives, before heading west.
Retrospection would eventually help put the pieces together; rather than random stops along the way, a life that was now beginning to reshape itself with the initial plan I had started off with when heading out a few years earlier (which was psychology and sociology) . It would begin to subtly reunite the past with the present. Probably because of my new found passion for traveling, I eventually went into truck driving, (my class A commercial license is in my wallet as I now write) .
It's simply amusing, even amazing how we sometimes politely persuade ourselves that we understand that which has not been spoken. Whether it's a week or two, and it becomes more apparent in months, how much we think of, care about, and finally admit how much we love them. Our families that nourish us, our neighbors that subtly support us and the city that we didn't' fall in love with until the first time that we left.
Each year we try like our parents did when we were children, to tell them how much they are loved, how much we care, and how much they truly have.
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The Parents Prayer II
There are few things that I could tell the wise,
When there are many wonders that are still a surprise.
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It was an altruistic and academic quest, which
led me to her door
As our host unlocked one room after another, we began to pace the floor
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We're here because of what they did in the past
And more will follow because of what we do
The things we vie to build should also last
Things we also vie to build with virtue
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The day's tumultuous events caused Poreris to drift back to when his niece, Desiree, was a little girl, and remembering her Uncle, Bill; her dad's brother who would come over and visit. One day while she was lying on the bed watching television, he walked into the room and began to talk to her. Just before walking into the room, he pulled a Laura Bush biography of the shelf with the intentions of having her read a few pages for him, simultaneously trying to create an atmosphere and cordial pattern of picking up a book when she has free time, on the weekends when a child thinks, and should think that it's time to forget everything that happened academically, and without a doubt during the summer when most things will discretely fade out through the osmosis of a long, hot, relaxing vacation.
Her grandmother had a small bookshelf at the end of the hall way, about two or three shelves of books; each of a different genre; half that her Uncle Bill put there himself after reading, from Poe, to Melville, to an autobiography of the former Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Colin Powel, who once said how ironic it was that his dad never owned a gun, yet his son becomes head of the most powerful military in the world; to Hillary Clinton a modern day female activist, former first lady and senator of New York. At that moment, also trying to show by example, how to take the time and have reading becoming an entertaining event as well as an academic one, and thus he had also brought with him and was in the middle of a fourteen hundred and fifty page novel by Victor Hugo; Les Mieserables, though right about at the halfway point he said that he wished that he had either taken a speed reading course or had bought the abridged version. And Condoleezza Rice, which he was telling a young lady named Shay that he met in Atlanta one day while passing through, whom he had a chance to have supper with one evening, that just halfway through the autobiography of her, Condoleezza Rice, that it had made him dizzy; she, as they say, has been everywhere and done everything, from a professor at Stanford University to Secretary of State; coming from a small conservative Christian family, and becoming a diligent female role model. He would have given her it to read, but he was only halfway through and refused to let it go.
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