Living Small in my Small Town

Living Small in my Small Town I’ve been home since Friday night and I’m only now beginning to recover enough to even think about adding to the blog. Five days in San Jose was simply draining … aside from the work things, which are too boring to blog about, just being around all those people, all that traffic, just the feeling of being in public for five days absolutely wore me out. Getting home was a trial, since there had been fog or snow or something in Salt Lake City that morning, which, since Salt Lake is the Delta hub, screwed up all the Delta flights. I flew from San Jose to Salt Lake sitting beside a nice man whose pregnant wife had gone off to the hospital that morning, and he was worried and trying to get back to Colorado Springs. Funny how sometimes travelling just seems like such a bad idea, how we get so used to the fact that we can cross the country in four or five hours that we forget that sometimes you just can’t get from here to there. (I hope he got home and everything was okay with the baby.) I got back to Bozeman just in time for another fun drive over the pass through heavy sleet and trucks in the ditch. I finally got back to town, and stopped in for what was left of happy hour at the Bar and Grill. There was my brother, my friends Scott and Jennifer, and the usual Friday evening characters (the nice lady who talks way too much about nothing, the talented cabinetmaker who drinks and becomes unreliable after about four in the afternoon). Glen the bartender made me a nice big gin and tonic and just knowing that people had been discussing the fact that the pass must be bad because it was taking me over an hour to get back from Bozeman made me feel happy, and home. I was back in my small town, where I’m known, where I’m not just one more anonymous person. That’s why I moved here, why I wanted a smaller life, a life small enough that I could know its contours.