My mother, Babs, and I had some crazy adventures while she was alive. One was the time I think I was in middle school living with my dad and my mom decides she is going to move from San Antonio to Denton to go to college. Now just for the record my mother was pretty brilliant, but could never finish things like a college degree. Her interests were always changing; therefore, she could never commit to a major. Many times, she would just sit in on a college class and not receive credit.

This time I agreed to help her move. We loaded everything she owned into an old station wagon. We made a stop at the pancake restaurant, iHop, that she had worked to receive her last paycheck. I waited in the car with all her earthly possessions while she went to get her check and then we were off. This would have been around the late 70s when we did this trip. Today it would take about five hours. Speed limits were different back then as well as roads so I think the trip should have taken us all day. Now because I am a Texan a drive is measured by hours and not miles. The drive today is around 300 miles.

I remember that I had on a white t-shirt and shorts. Why do I remember this? I fell asleep while holding an orange juice. I woke up and was no longer wearing white. My mother also had many clunker cars while I was growing up and the station wagon was one of them. After about four hours into our drive, the car got a flat tire. Here is the thing. To get to the spare, we had to take all my mother’s things out of the car on the side of the road only to find there was no spare. We loaded everything back into the car. Some stranger stopped and took us to the next town to find a tire and then took us back.

We got the new tire on the car and finished our drive. By the time we got to Denton we were tired. I don’t remember how I got back home, but it probably involved a bus ride. I took a few Greyhound bus trips while growing up because my mom was a bit of a gypsy. She could never stay in one place for more than three years before she would move again. She wasn’t what you would call a conventional mother and things could be a little wild at times. My childhood was a bit of a rollercoaster, but one thing about my mother is she lived in the moment.