This isn’t the first time…I’m on my way to bed, and get an idea of something I want to write.  I throw some clothes on and turn on the tablet and get the app started, and the idea is gone.

How do people do it?

Like is it better to just force my self to sit here and type crap, or is there an actual method?  

A little remembrance maybe? 

My parents came from humble roots, I think everyone from era did, but did well for themselves.  We weren’t rich, but I grew up in that flash in the pan called the “middle class”.  We could probably be called a lot of things, but we’ll go with that for now. 

Both parents were from the eastern part of Texas.  They grew up near the megopolis known as Bay City, Texas.  What I can remember was more specifically Markham, Texas.  You may need to zoom a lot to find either.  We didn’t spend a lot of time with most of my dads family, some were too far away, I think there were a few unresolved issues in there, and my grandmother just floated from family to family.  So most vacations were to my mom’s family..

I spent what seemed like a lot of time in Markham growing up.  Many years we packed up and drove across the state for holidays there, and a lot of summers I would get to spend at least a chunk of the summer there with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  We would follow grandpa around as he would knock the bats out of his fruit trees, and collect peaches for grandma to make cobbler, or maybe peach preserves or jam.

Every summer we showed up, grandpa would give us a lecture about staying out of his garden because x, y, and z were ripe.  It would take less than a half hour for us to be out there stuffing our faces with everything that was ripe.  I think we were all adults before it dawned on us that half the stuff he grew, grandpa didn’t even eat.  What us kids didn’t kill mostly was wasted.

Markham, at least when I was a kid, was mostly shell roads.  I guess there had been a thriving oyster market there at one time, so oyster shells were cheaper than gravel, and were used to “pave” dirt roads. “THE HIGHWAY”, no clue what highway, though I guess I could look it up, but always said in all caps and often underlined, ran through town. Grandpa was a welder and lived in Texas so of course he drove a truck.  I think it was what is now called a “step side”?  It had a shelf behind the cap of the truck that you could stand on, and it was always a terrifying thrill to ride around town on the running boards.  I think today it called child endangerment?

And no, that isn’t how I rode, but Chat GPT cant seem to grasp the idea, and I have not artistic talent.