Thursday we drove to New Mexico to see her family. DeAnja really wanted to go. I didn’t want her to go up there by herself, even if she was riding with her relatives. I guess that’s what being married is like. You go places with each other because being apart doesn’t feel right.

We were there Thursday through Sunday. I played video games, read half of “Deliverance”, and got to go skiing at Wolf Creek.

On the 15 hour drive back to Little Rock, somewhere between Amarillo and Oklahoma, a group of five or six Spanish people stood around crying and hugging each other in a gas station candy isle. It obviously wasn’t for a cat. We were only there to get gas and eat more junk, but something awful had just happened to somebody they cared about. I stopped in my tracks and stood there for a solid minute, holding my reece’s peeces a couple of isles away, and felt their pain.

Additionally depressing it was, to see such dignified sadness in a place that lacked any dignity at all. They deserved someplace better. Better than a truckstop/KFC/Burger King/ Popeyes Chicken that also sells gasoline.