“Was that a good Christmas for ya, kids?” Dad asked.
Dad always liked to ask that question after any festive event. If
we had a birthday party, “Was that a good birthday for ya, Angela?” Thanksgiving dinner, “Was that some good turkey, kids?” Arbor Day, “Aren't those some good trees, kids?”
“Yes. Thanks, Dad,” I echoed the rest of my siblings.
My family is a deeply religious family, and Christmas is a deeply religious holiday. For most religious families Christmas lasts the entire day, not just the time it takes to tear open our brown paper packages tied up with string, which, of course, is just one of a few of my favorite things. That particular Christmas was a little different, though. It felt like Christmas only until we finished tearing open our toys, then it became just another day.
Being religious means we should take care of the less fortunate, especially around the holiday season, and that Christmas was the first Christmas in my life where my family was homeless. No, we didn’t need someone to bake us a ham or sacrifice some turkey for our hungry bellies because we weren’t hungry. We were just homeless.
“All right,” Mom said as soon as we all held our new Christmas toys. “Time to load up the moving truck.”
We had sold our house. We were moving to a whole new town. Dad had some interesting and unfortunate things happen with his hospital administration position where we were living in Fallon, Nevada, and after a short period of stress and worry, he found himself a new hospital administrator job in the small town of Caliente, Nevada. The timing of everything meant that we needed to be out on Christmas day. Feliz Navidad to us!
That’s how we spent Christmas Day in 1995, squatting in someone else’s home while they were away on vacation with our Uhaul sitting out front. We stayed there for a fortnight before we were finally allowed to move into our new place in Caliente. We not only had the moving truck loaded up (Dad drove that), but we also filled the little Toyota pickup (my buddy, Gota, manned that one), jam packed the Volkswagen van (my older brother, Bryan, behind the wheel there), and stuffed the GMC Suburban as well (that one was all mine to drive).
“Do you want one of these?” Gota asked me when we stopped at a gas station in Hawthorne. He held up a bottle of pep pills. “They help keep you awake.”
“Might be a good idea,” I said.
I was 18 and it was my first time swallowing a pep pill. It wasn’t anything crazy or dangerous, just an over the counter caffeine pill, but for me it was really strong. Caffeine wasn’t part of my normal routine, never drinking coffee and rarely even having any kind of caffeinated soda. Within minutes of getting back on the road, my eyes were wide wide wide open. The good news was there was no chance that Mr. Sandman was going to find me while I drove down Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway (called that because it goes right by area 51, alien sightings, etc.). The bad news was that the caffeine had me jumping out of my skin, but I was still trapped in the cab of a GMC. So when we stopped again in Tonopah for a quick fuel stop, I ran laps around the vehicles for 10 minutes just to keep myself from exploding.
“I don’t like this highway at all,” Gota said. “There are no fences to keep the cows off the road.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Doesn’t help that the sun went down hours ago.”
“And every bush out here is the size of a cow,” Gota continued. “Every time I see one I about wet myself thinking it’s gonna jump out in front of me before I realize it’s just a shrub.”
A lot of people think they know what a small town is like but very few really do. Fallon, where we were leaving, had somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people who wrote Fallon as their return address, although few of those people actually lived within the city boundaries. By most accounts, people would call that a small town. Compared to Caliente, though, Fallon is a metropolis. Caliente can best be described as a small neighborhood without any other neighborhoods around it. With a population of roughly 1,000 people, it was the biggest town we had seen since our moving truck pulled out of Tonopah 250 miles earlier, which wasn’t a whole lot bigger than Caliente.
The drive left us all exhausted. I’m not sure if it was because the truck was so heavy, or because the truck was so crappy, but the Uhaul truck my pops was driving really struggled to reach every mountain peak as we inched our way along the desert highway. My pep pill wore off about an hour before we got to our destination, and what was usually a 5 ½ hour drive took 9 hours. We were ready for bed.
Morning came and it was time to unload all of our stuff. We unloaded everything, which we were soon to discover was a big mistake.
To be concluded...
Dad always liked to ask that question after any festive event. If
we had a birthday party, “Was that a good birthday for ya, Angela?” Thanksgiving dinner, “Was that some good turkey, kids?” Arbor Day, “Aren't those some good trees, kids?”
“Yes. Thanks, Dad,” I echoed the rest of my siblings.
My family is a deeply religious family, and Christmas is a deeply religious holiday. For most religious families Christmas lasts the entire day, not just the time it takes to tear open our brown paper packages tied up with string, which, of course, is just one of a few of my favorite things. That particular Christmas was a little different, though. It felt like Christmas only until we finished tearing open our toys, then it became just another day.
Being religious means we should take care of the less fortunate, especially around the holiday season, and that Christmas was the first Christmas in my life where my family was homeless. No, we didn’t need someone to bake us a ham or sacrifice some turkey for our hungry bellies because we weren’t hungry. We were just homeless.
“All right,” Mom said as soon as we all held our new Christmas toys. “Time to load up the moving truck.”
We had sold our house. We were moving to a whole new town. Dad had some interesting and unfortunate things happen with his hospital administration position where we were living in Fallon, Nevada, and after a short period of stress and worry, he found himself a new hospital administrator job in the small town of Caliente, Nevada. The timing of everything meant that we needed to be out on Christmas day. Feliz Navidad to us!
That’s how we spent Christmas Day in 1995, squatting in someone else’s home while they were away on vacation with our Uhaul sitting out front. We stayed there for a fortnight before we were finally allowed to move into our new place in Caliente. We not only had the moving truck loaded up (Dad drove that), but we also filled the little Toyota pickup (my buddy, Gota, manned that one), jam packed the Volkswagen van (my older brother, Bryan, behind the wheel there), and stuffed the GMC Suburban as well (that one was all mine to drive).
“Do you want one of these?” Gota asked me when we stopped at a gas station in Hawthorne. He held up a bottle of pep pills. “They help keep you awake.”
“Might be a good idea,” I said.
I was 18 and it was my first time swallowing a pep pill. It wasn’t anything crazy or dangerous, just an over the counter caffeine pill, but for me it was really strong. Caffeine wasn’t part of my normal routine, never drinking coffee and rarely even having any kind of caffeinated soda. Within minutes of getting back on the road, my eyes were wide wide wide open. The good news was there was no chance that Mr. Sandman was going to find me while I drove down Nevada’s Extraterrestrial Highway (called that because it goes right by area 51, alien sightings, etc.). The bad news was that the caffeine had me jumping out of my skin, but I was still trapped in the cab of a GMC. So when we stopped again in Tonopah for a quick fuel stop, I ran laps around the vehicles for 10 minutes just to keep myself from exploding.
“I don’t like this highway at all,” Gota said. “There are no fences to keep the cows off the road.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Doesn’t help that the sun went down hours ago.”
“And every bush out here is the size of a cow,” Gota continued. “Every time I see one I about wet myself thinking it’s gonna jump out in front of me before I realize it’s just a shrub.”
A lot of people think they know what a small town is like but very few really do. Fallon, where we were leaving, had somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 people who wrote Fallon as their return address, although few of those people actually lived within the city boundaries. By most accounts, people would call that a small town. Compared to Caliente, though, Fallon is a metropolis. Caliente can best be described as a small neighborhood without any other neighborhoods around it. With a population of roughly 1,000 people, it was the biggest town we had seen since our moving truck pulled out of Tonopah 250 miles earlier, which wasn’t a whole lot bigger than Caliente.
The drive left us all exhausted. I’m not sure if it was because the truck was so heavy, or because the truck was so crappy, but the Uhaul truck my pops was driving really struggled to reach every mountain peak as we inched our way along the desert highway. My pep pill wore off about an hour before we got to our destination, and what was usually a 5 ½ hour drive took 9 hours. We were ready for bed.
Morning came and it was time to unload all of our stuff. We unloaded everything, which we were soon to discover was a big mistake.
To be concluded...
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