Better By a Mile

June 14th, 1997 was a clear, sunny Saturday.  I would soon be thankful that.  It was also the day that I took my SAT test.  You know, the test that was supposed to help determine whether or not you could get into the college of your choosing.  Like almost any other test I've taken in my life, I obsessed too much about it and did plenty of cramming to prepare for it.  At the time, I lived just outside Sunbury, PA and the test was being held 20 miles away at a high school in Shamokin, PA.  Early that morning, my father and sister dropped me off and wished me luck. The test went ok.  It took several hours, but I got through it and ended up scoring high enough to get into most of the schools I was looking at.  After I finished, I wandered the halls of the school in search of a phone to call my sister to come pick me up.  When she answered, she told me that Dad was taking a nap.  I asked her to wake him up and see if he would let her...

One day, my lovely wife asked me why I keep a framed copy of this photograph around the house.  I told her that it is an important reminder to me that no matter how bad I think things get, they could always get, and have been, worse. At some point in my childhood (one of my goals will be to piece some dates together, but this was probably around 1990), my father, sister, and I lived in this house.  Aside from the overgrown landscape, it looks in this photograph very much the same as it did then.  It was probably the worst house we lived in during my childhood.  I know my dad wasn't very proud of it, but it was all we could find at the time.  We had just moved from Leesville, LA to be closer to our mother and some of my dad's old biker buddies from our time in California (another chapter). Interestingly, what got me thinking about this old house on Shallowford Road in Moss Point, MS, was the Nintendo Classic craze that we just experienced this past Christmas...