It is the hour before midnight, on the harsh, gray flat asphalt road along the banks of one of the Great Lakes . A truck races by like a shadow, the moon glowing behind a small house. The car swiftly goes on by, the dim light from the fogy night: --moon penetrating through the fog onto the tuck and house, where a man is standing by the road; -- music is heard coming from the car, Rock & Roll, as this stranger standing by the road, a man in a red plaid shirt, he stands erect, as if he was Paul Bunion; standing in-between the road and the house as a truck races by. See my family has always been sort of dysfunctional and encountered endless arguments over senseless topics for as long as I can remember. The lesson of karma is that at some point in time, God, the Universe and the "powers that be" will step in with the intent of rebuilding the structure of a family broken down.

Along the roadside you can see the shades of dark-green and black shadows along the grass, and the crossing of shadows along the forwarding black asphalt road, as the Ford-truck glides along. site Hannah's was just a hole-in-the-wall, long and narrow with a bar running almost the whole length of the building. The brick on the face of the building, and the white wooden door outside, were nearly black from years of soot from the coke plant and steel mills. Patrons tended to be older folks who spent what was left of their paychecks on booze, Polish sausages, hard-boiled eggs, and illegal tip boards. As my eyeballs came back into focus, I watched him unfold the same pocket knife and as he bent to retrieve another chile from the plant, I prayed it wasn't for me. Realizing it wasn't I thanked the great capsicum god in the Hatch volcano and considered crying. My mother and father enjoyed much of their leisure time with drive in movies, watching TV shows such as MASH, All in the Family, Dukes of Hazard, and Andy Griffith. They enjoyed the music of Merle Haggard, Freddy Hart and Conway Twitty. Lastly, they enjoyed fast cars as well as many people did in the seventies. Drag racing was a fun event for both my mother and my father. In the seventies my father owned a 1972 Ford Galaxy 500, 1970 Road Runner, 1973 Ranchero, and a 1976 buy truck engines online. The cost of a new vehicle was around $6000. Over all, the most rememberable event for my mother in the seventies was in 1977 when Elvis Presley died. Jumping off the back of the deuce-and-half truck, brushing through the crowd of peanut girls, I headed to the bar. It was a beautiful day with sunlight dappling the shaded roadway. A couple of guys that had graduated from high school with me picked me up at the end of my afternoon shift, and we went drinking in Lorain. We ended up in Hannah's Bar on North Broadway just a couple of blocks south of Lake Erie. Teddie grew up, started his own family and moved away. The man died of some terrible disease, but Charlie lived on. Twenty years and several more trims later, he was still going strong. She sometimes sent Teddie photos of the plant, if only to remind him of that time in their lives. She always hoped he'd see in those pictures what she was really trying to say. She'd have to remember to mention it someday.