Weird, Wild and Wonderful 

(Blind Boys of Alabama Transition)

Weird, wild and wonderful – that was what I was thinking as I stood on the football field at Norwalk Junior High School in 1983, waiting for my high school graduation ceremony to begin.  As in, “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but I hope it is weird, wild and wonderful.”  

All I knew for certain was that after a summer working on the county road crews, I would leave the house I grew up in on Main St. and begin attending Miami University. I had no plans — just wishes, hopes, and maybe a prayer. 

Likewise, when I graduated from MU five years later, my goal was to leave Ohio behind and leap feet first into the deep end of life by moving to Vermont and “see what happens next.”  I would never admit it to my family, any friends I had left and even to myself, but I knew in my heart that once my short-term job in the Green Mountains was over, I was not returning to Ohio to pursue a career related to the English Education degree that I had (barely) just earned.  

It would be nearly two decades before I would return to Ohio, with a wife, two dogs and two cats. In a hugely ironic twist, we moved back to Oxford, Ohio, a place I had never left so much as escaped.

I never was much of a planner.  To paraphrase a line from an old Vincent Price movie I barely remember watching early one morning late at night, “I am like water, open a path to the East and I flow to the East.”