Thanks, George

George Maharis died a few weeks ago and it felt life-sobering, as my sister Judy liked to say about events that hit hard. I had a huge crush on George when I was around ten. Never mind that he was 94 years old when he died, in my mind he had lived on as the hunky twenty-something Buz Murdoch on “Route 66”. I couldn’t wait for the show to start every week. I so envied the nomadic life he had with his pal Tod. When our kids were small, I used to pester my husband, saying “Let’s sell everything and go on the road”. His reply was always, “And then what………..”. Our four-year-old son’s ready response was, “We’ll sell apples!” Where we’d acquire those apples, I have no idea. So we didn’t sell everything or pull a Jack Kerouac but we moved so many times — eight different states in our married life — that we may as well have. Ridding ourselves of extra belongings in a myriad of garage sales, starting in a new place and acquiring different things to be gotten rid of in the next move. “We couldn’t afford to travel, so we moved,” is my husband’s tongue-in-cheek explanation to people who ask why we had had so many different locations. Now that we’re no longer actively working, we have a darling little teardrop T@B camper and we go lots of places. When we bought it, I hugged the dealer and told him it was the happiest day of my life. I’m still in love with our T@B and though I live in the state famous for and associated with apples, it turns out I don’t have to sell them after all.

Photo of our cute little T@B courtesy of me, Mary Kunkel.