You win. Not so young, though, I’ll give the West a try. Carless, I left the highways to fly the skies. My ventures west were really a fluke. I had been accepted to study in Paris, but it all fell through at the last minute. So I took my Paris luggage and flew to San Francisco. Initially, my travels there were with a monthly bus pass, but eventually I had a Ford Escort and got better acquainted with California. Most of my San Francisco days were spent in the Haight-Ashbury where, as Organist-Choirmaster, I installed a new tracker organ in the neighborly All Saints’ Episcopal church.
Receiving an early retirement from the University of California Medical School, I left San Francisco. Up the coast and inland I went to settle on a mountain outside the Napa Valley and discover the top of the state. By now, I was accumulating too much stuff to move via a car, so a U-Haul truck took me further north to the Oregon coast and then a moving van to the mountains of Eastern Oregon. In both places, I created a bookstore and did music on the side.
If you ever read the book The Shack, you may remember the tragic accident that happened at the corner in Joseph, Oregon. My bookstore was the second building in with the slanting roof over the sidewalk at that corner. You can believe I sold a lot of copies of that book while I had the store.
After I closed my second store, I developed a chain of small convenience stores where I could sell books, and I thoroughly enjoyed traveling to service those accounts. Once I went to online selling, I traveled all over Oregon with a pickup truck, sleeping in the back wherever I felt like stopping.
And stopping I did. After 30 years in the West, I felt the urge to go back east. So I put a canopy on the truck, stored all my belongings, and headed out for parts unknown. This travel venture was the greatest experience of all my travels. Stay tuned.
