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Today was a little bit of a diversion, and one I'm completely thrilled to have taken.
Last night, while typing up yesterday's version of this blog, I was suddenly overcome with an urge to do something precipitous. Change the game up a little bit and do the unexpected. Sitting as I was in Elk City, Oklahoma I happened to notice that Abilene Texas was only about 250 miles due south. Kennedy and I had originally planned to push all the way through Texas today and get partway to Albuquerque before stopping for the night, but I suddenly had something very important to do in Texas.
There's a lady living in Abilene who has been one of the dearest friends my wife Eileen, our good friend Dana Robinson and I have had for the last fifteen years. Her name is Jacy Clark, and we "met" on the internet back around 2000 or so when both of us ventured onto a website called WheelofTime.org. WoT was a website dedicated to the books of the late Robert Jordan, author of the first 11 books in the series by the same name. Jordan died in 2007 after giving the world what stands as
one of the great epic fantasy stories ever written - yet he died without finishing it. I won't go into the long story of his illness and the subsequent search for another writer to finish the story undertaken by his widow, Harriet McDougal. That story has been well chronicled elsewhere. What I will tell you about - briefly - is the magic his world created for people like Jacy, Dana, Eileen and I.
WoT.org was a storytelling site. What we did bears some similarity to the roleplaying games that have been around forever; we built characters, gave them names, attributes, strengths and weaknesses and lived their lives by the rules of the world Jordan had created. Where our site diverged from the traditional take, however was that instead of "gaming" with dice, we wrote stories. Alone, as pairs or in groups of 10 or more, we wrote an ongoing narrative of our characters as they lived out their lives in Jordan's world. It was altogether brilliant, and the site was graced by some truly talented writers. One of the most talented was Jacy, and we became collaborators on some of the best written work I've ever been a part
of. By creating this narrative together, we became very close friends "IRL" (in real life) and have stayed that way ever since.
The first time I met Jacy was about 7 hours ago.
It had to be done. I talked to Kennedy about the side-trip at dinner last night and he was all for it. By 7:30 this morning we were on the road, pulling into the parking lot of Lytle's Land and Cattle Company right around 11:15. We met Jacy in the parking lot (she'd been there waiting for God knows how long, bless her) and for the next hour and 45 minutes we had what has to be the strangest "old friends" conversation on record, considering the two people had really only just met.
It ended far too soon, and Kennedy and I were back on the road - this time north and west to Amarillo, where we've stopped for the night. In all, we did about 520 miles of driving today, and the 105 minutes I got to spend with one of the sweetest people I have ever known was worth every bit of the time spent to get there.
It didn't hurt
that Lytle's makes a truly ass-kicking steak called "The Abilinean", a 22oz bone-out ribeye (my second in 12 hours - WINNING!) that came with grilled asparagus and some deep fried okra that was truly to die for. If you're ever in Abilene, go there. Twice.
So yeah...not many pictures today - though I did take an amazing panorama shot in southern Oklahoma that will soon be my cover photo on the book of faces. Truth is, though there's only one photo that matters, and that's the one at the top of this page.
Tomorrow, we run for Albuquerque and see what happens next. Back to 66!
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