To continue from where I left off (because not only was that last post exceedingly long, but it took me a week to write, in no less than ten different sessions), I've now covered everything during the trip up to my last day in West Virginia. So, let's cover that now, and then get to the flights back home to further wrap this up.
Tuesday (the 20th) would be my last full day back home. I would fly out the next afternoon, so if there was anything I needed to do while I was there it needed to be finished by the time I went to bed on Tuesday night -- as on Wednesday morning, I would be getting out the door on the way to the airport by 8AM.
Lady and I had scheduled our travel after WV to coincide rather well, actually, if everything were to go smoothly. Her train would arrive back here in the midwest on Tuesday night, and she would get back to her classes on Wednesday morning, as I was flying back to Wichita. At least that was the plan, anyhow. You'll see later in this post how this plan got a few wrenches thrown into it, but I'll get to that. I'll also say that the further plan at this point was for her to also be in Newton again that weekend, so we both had something to look forward to after returning to our respective homes-away-from-home/schools, but I'll get to that too.
I awakened on Tuesday morning to find that my mother was worried about our old dog, Moot. I've not written much about Moot here (mainly because I don't live at home anymore), but Moot is a shih-tzu. Purebred. Mom and I got him from a pet store in the Century III Mall in Pittsburgh in July 1998 when he was just a puppy. He's fourteen this month, and for the past few years he's been a little worse for wear because of his age -- he has severe cataracts to the point where he can barely see, and his legs/hips are giving out on him, requiring him to get semi-regular laser-based treatments at the vet so that he can actually move around normally. Throughout all of my formative years (and I use that term loosely), that little dog has been like a little brother to me. Moot has always been a part of the family, the favorite one, the little prince. My mother loves that dog; my dad and I joke (well, half-jokingly) that she loves that dog more than she loves either of us. So, there's a little backstory.
Anyway, on Tuesday morning, he was sick. He'd been sick since Sunday, around the time of the party, and had been needing to go outside fifteen times a day or more -- digestive troubles. I won't go into details, but I'm guessing your can probably assume what I mean by that. Needless to say, he wasn't feeling well; he wasn't eating or drinking any water (a telltale sign for that dog, as he's always eaten like a hog) and Mom was very concerned about him. So, first thing that morning, she called the vet to see if they could see him that day, to check him out and see if there was anything really wrong with him, or if he was just old and having a few days of "old dog syndrome."
The elephant in the room here is that all of us know Moot's days are numbered because he's so old, but it's the one thing that none of us ever discuss. My dad had a dog for a long time as well; her name was Betty. She died in 2008 around the age of 15 or so, and both of them were pretty distraught over it. Now, along with Moot, my parents have three indoor/outdoor cats, so hopefully when Moot does eventually die, the blow will be lessened by having the cats around the house.
The vet said they'd take him in for observation for the day, but we had to get him there then because they were booked solid with appointments. So, we got ready and left the house. This entailed a lot of driving and running around the city of Morgantown. During lunchtime rush hour. On a weekday when classes at WVU were still in session (their break was last week, the week after I'd come home). Here's the order in which we planned to do everything:
1.) Take Moot to the vet.
2.) Go to the post office (around the same area)
3.) Drive back across town to Kmart to get my phone card fixed.
4.) Drive back to the other end of town, again, to leave town and go visit my grandmother.
5.) Drive back to down again after that in order to have dinner with my former boss.
This is a lot of driving, yes. But the weather was beautiful -- around 80 degrees, not a cloud in the sky -- as it had been the entire time I was visiting back home. So, we did these things, in this order, and didn't run into any snags until part 3.
Kmart.
Sigh.
Look, before I go further, I will say that I really, really like Kmart. I wish there were more than one or two Kmart stores in a 50-mile radius out here in Kansas. For many years, I bought a lot of my clothing at Kmart, including a large chunk of my underwear and at least two bathrobes, along with many button-up shirts and jeans (when I was in undergrad and actually wore jeans, that is). My favorite hoodie is a Joe Boxer hoodie from Kmart, because it's incredibly comfortable. So, I mean, I have a history of never having any problems with the company and enjoying shopping in their stores.
"I hope they don't give me shit over this phone card thing," I told my mother in the car. "Airtime is non-refundable; it's one of the few things they could really just say 'sorry' and basically steal my $50 over."
"I'm sure they can fix it," she replied. "You have the card, you have the receipt that says its activation failed...what else can they do?"
It turns out they can do quite a lot, and all of it wrong.
When we went to Kmart, I went to the service desk and explained my situation. Instead of helping me, they immediately got pissed at the cashier who had sold the card to me, because said cashier (who wasn't even there when I'd come back in) required an override after the activation failed to actually sell it to me. Of course, having previously worked in retail for many years, I knew all about overrides -- but it's not like I was paying attention on Saturday to what was happening behind the counter. I just expected these ladies to do their job. Instead they grilled me for questioning.
"Who sold you this card? When were you here? Did you pay cash? Why were you allowed to buy it if it wasn't activated?"
WTF, customer service? I don't give a shit. Just fucking activate it and deal with your administrative bullshit later once I'm gone.
So the cashier at the service desk swiped the card again. Activation failed. Again. Okay.
"Do you want me to get another card off the rack to replace it, if that one isn't going to work?" I asked. I was trying to be helpful mainly because I wanted my damned phone to work and I wanted them to fix what they'd screwed up. Plus, the service desk had a line of about five people behind me.
"Yeah," she said.
So I did. I went to get another card off the rack, and in the meantime the ladies at the desk were able to deal with a few other customers in line behind me. The second card failed activation as well. What. The everliving. Fuck.
"Go get all of them off the rack," the CSM said to the cashier. We'll run them through until one works.
And they did this. The women at the customer service counter went through at least fifteen cards. All of them failed activation. All of them. There were at least three different types of T-Mobile cards they swiped. Not one of them would work. At all. At this point, not only was I getting frustrated, but so were the cashiers and CSMs, and everyone behind me waiting in line. Not to mention my parents, who were both waiting for me, in the car, to just get this fixed as well. Mom had gone to look at flowers, but was done and had been done for a while by the time they finished with me.
Finally, the flustered CSM just asked me "Well, we can't get these to work, do you just want a refund for the card you bought?"
Yes, please, I wanted to say, and for fuck's sake fix your machines, because I'm sure all of those cards are fine.
She gave me my refund in cash, apologized profusely, and I left.
This, of course, still meant that I had zero minutes on my phone, and that I was back to square one.
"I have to get some minutes on my phone somehow," I told my parents. "Don't care where we have to go -- gas stations, Kroger, Walmart -- all of them should have T-Mobile cards, and I just need to pick up one from somewhere other than this fucking place."
I believe those were my exact words, really.
Here is the problem, however. T-Mobile isn't really a supported cell carrier in West Virginia. The fact that Kmart had those cards in the first place was probably more a fluke than anything else. I found this out when, upon going to Walmart (my parents' choice, as my mother wanted to look for flowers and it was on the way out of town), I only saw cards for Virgin, Boost Mobile (whatever the hell that is), Tracfone, and the AT&T GO phone. Except for one card hidden in the back of everything -- something called a universal wireless card.
I've used these before on occasion, so I knew they worked. It's basically a card that will let you add minutes to any prepaid phone for any carrier. T-Mobile is, thankfully, on that list, so I had no choice but to purchase it if I wanted to have any sort of phone service before I got back to Kansas. Normally, that wouldn't be an issue, but with me flying back home and Lady taking the train -- both of us out of contact from one another -- in case there was an emergency of any sort, I wanted us to be able to reach each other. As much as I abhor cell phones on general principle (read: I hate not being able to just say "oh, I must've not been home when you called"), it's sort of my lifeline to a certain extent if any bad shit goes down.
So, I purchased that card. Additionally, at the register I'd seen something I'd never seen before -- an electronic cigarette (you know, the eCig things) starter kit for $13. So I purchased that too, just to try it out. I've been wanting one for a while, but they've always been so prohibitively expensive -- most of them $100 or more -- that I shied away from it. I'll get to this more later, however.
With one problem taken care of, we made the journey to my grandmother's house.
Over the hill and through the woods, to grandmother's house we gooo....
For my grandmother, that song is rather accurate. You do have to drive over a big hill and through some sparsely-populated, country wooded areas to get to her house. She lives about 20 miles to the west of Morgantown, in a little town called Blacksville (highly ironic because there are no African-Americans who live there that I know of, anyway; they should call the town Whitetrashville).
My grandmother (or Grammy, as I have always called her) has not been in the best of health for several years now....like, twenty years now. She's 84, has heart disease, a pacemaker, and osteoporosis, has had at least one debilitating stroke fifteen years ago (which, thankfully, she recovered from), and she lives alone. For the past year or two, she's had an in-home aide who hasn't lived with her, but comes by on a daily basis for so many hours to help take care of her and help her get around, as she can barely walk now without a cane. Over the years she has shrank to such a diminutive size; she's now well under five feet tall, and weighs less than 100 pounds. To hug and kiss her I have to bend down almost in half.
Still, for the most part she remains in good spirits, and her mind is as sharp as it ever was. Every time I visit her, though, I do worry that it's going to be the last -- so whenever I go to West Virginia, I simply must see her. Regardless of what else is going on in the world or out there with my extended family (believe me, that's a whole other mess of a story for another time) it is an unspoken rule that when I am there, I am visiting Grammy. No matter what. The woman practically raised me when I was a young child; she cooked for me, she taught me how to read, and she took care of me almost every day while my parents were at work. Grammy is very, very important to me, is what I'm saying.
However, because of the phone card debacle, the dog being at the vet, and the set time frame of 4:30 for dinner with my former boss, we didn't arrive at my grandmother's house until 3PM or so. Which was bad on several levels, but mainly because on my other visits to see her, we've generally spent three or four hours with her. This time we were there for a little over an hour, and while she was very, very happy to see me, I wish we could've stayed longer. Still, the only reasons we always stuck around that long before were because most of the time, other family members would come to Grammy's house to visit me as well. As most of said family members no longer speak to each other (like I said, a story for another time, and one that I'll probably never tell in this blog), this time it was just us.
I activated the phone card from Grammy's house, and was able to get it to work fine. I'm still burning through those minutes now; I'll need another card in another week or two, but I have to pay all of the household bills first. At Grammy's, I took a few pictures; one of which was her and my mother together on the couch, but as I didn't have any relatives there to visit me as well, it was a rather subdued visit. Aside from the photo Andrea took of me and Shainna in the Kmart chairs and a few pictures that Lady took of me/us together on that day as well, I didn't take or have any pictures taken of me to document the trip. This, by the way, is one of the pictures Lady took of me:
I call this "the pensive face." It was taken inside her aunt's Prius, in the Gabes/Kmart parking lot.
Ahem. Anyway.
When we left Grammy's house, I was surprised that she wasn't crying more than she was. Grammy is always concerned, as I mentioned before, that every time she sees me may be her last, because she has no rose-colored glasses about where her life is headed. She's told me many times that she knows she's going to die soon, and that she's afraid she's going to die before she sees me again. She tells me this (I think) mostly because she knows I am mature enough and intelligent enough to handle that fact without disagreeing with her or telling her she's overreacting -- as most of her children or other grandchildren would do or have done. While I don't want to think about that inevitable future, of course, it's not like I ignore that it will eventually happen.
When we left, she pressed a $20 bill into my hand, and told me that she wanted me to have it. She wouldn't take no for an answer, wouldn't let me leave without taking it. For Grammy, this is strange -- the woman doesn't really have a lot of spare money, and never has. She's always been a homemaker her entire life, and after her husband died (three months before I was born), she's lived on her social security income and his pension (as long as that lasted, anyhow; I don't think she gets it anymore). She's never had any other real regular income, and she pays the woman who takes care of her, the house aide, on an hourly basis. So it's not like she has money to spare.
After I left I realized she gave me the money probably because she couldn't afford to send out money in the Christmas cards this year -- usually she sends out $30 in the Christmas cards for those of us who are single, and $50 for those of us who are married. I told her she didn't have to worry about it for me this past year, even though I was absolutely broke at that time. She needs her money more than I do. I would have felt incredibly guilty. I still felt guilty taking the $20 she gave me.
Anyway, the rest of the afternoon ended up being a complete clusterfuck. And I do mean that in the nicest, but sincerest way possible.
As I'll remind you, the dog was at the vet, so we were not only on a timeframe to meet up with my former boss for dinner, but we were on a timeframe to pick him up before the vet's office closed as well. The plan was (since we didn't have any other options) for us to pick up the dog, have my dad drop me and Mom off at the Mexican place while dad ran the dog home and made sure he was okay, and then come back in for dinner with all of us. It wasn't the best plan, but it was what we had to do -- the vet trip had thrown a wrench into everything we'd needed to do that day, and it's not like we could leave the dog in my dad's SUV for two hours while we had dinner.
We were scheduled to meet with my former boss for dinner at 4:30. We got back into Morgantown a little after 4, so everything seemed to be working in our favor. Until we got to the vet's office. My parents went inside while I waited in the car and texted Lady to let her know I had gotten my phone fixed. Twenty minutes passed. Nothing. Thirty minutes passed. Nothing. We were now officially late for dinner. I got out of the car and purchased a Coke from the machine outside the vet's door, to see my parents waiting inside the office. They were the only ones in there. Mom shrugged at me. I smoked a cigarette and drank the Coke. Forty-five minutes had passed, and all of us were just waiting there. Technically, the vet's office was past closing time at this point, and yet the dog was still in the back.
At the hour mark, I went inside and asked "is there something wrong with him? WTF is taking so long?" or something to that effect. We were already half an hour late to meet my former boss, and Mom had called him a few times on his cell but couldn't get him, so we had no way of telling him we'd been held up.
The dog was fine, but the vet techs were taking forever to bring him back out. Finally, at the hour-and-fifteen-minute mark, we got the dog back. They said he probably had a stomach virus, but otherwise he was just fine. They'd given him fluids and had watched him, and he seemed to be okay for the most part. We took him for a little walk outside the office to let him pee, and then put him back in the carrier and left. We were now almost a full hour late for meeting with my former boss. Dad dropped us off at the restaurant and then took the dog home.
Luckily, my former boss and his wife were still there, and were not upset with us. I let Mom tell the whole story about what had happened, and then fielded questions about my life/job/etc. with my former boss, who I hadn't seen since 2006.
I've not talked about it a lot here in this blog, anyway, but to clarify what I did I'll mention it now -- from July 2001 to November 2006, off and on (yes, a month before I was a college student and a year-and-a-half or so after I'd graduated from WVU), I worked as a laboratory technician (later bumped up to the more regal-sounding position of "Laboratory Assistant II") for the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Cell Biology at WVU. My mother was the office administrator of said department for about ten years or so, so not only did I already know everyone in the department from a young age, but they also knew how intelligent I was. Because the man who would later become my boss had a lab and needed some help to keep it running, I met with him and he gave me a shot at doing so -- paying me out of his research grant. I started out at $5.15 an hour (minimum wage in 2001, of course) and worked anywhere from 10-25 hours a week throughout the first three years of my college career. It was interesting but fairly simple work -- I would take care of the lab's sanitation (spraying down everything with alcohol, keeping stuff as sterile as possible), wash/autoclave glassware, order parts and supplies for the lab from a number of different scientific websites and/or catalogs, mix and prepare formulas and mediums, and would do really fun stuff like refilling the liquid nitrogen tank. I was also in charge, as I was an English major, of proofreading every new publication the lab would put out for clarity and typographical issues, and spent many many hours in the stacks of the library getting bound journals and making copies of articles in the main office. I was, as some would say, the "lab bitch." Anything that I could do which would save the other lab workers (of which there were four, both graduate students and post-docs) time, I did it. And I loved my job for the most part. It was fun, it was fulfilling, and it looks damned good on a resume. It was that job that gave me the "experience" I needed to teach the Science/Engineering English 102 class I'm teaching right now at Flat State University.
As I said, I worked that job off-and-on for over five years -- I took a hiatus from it in 2005, as I was wrapping up my senior year at WVU (and had two eighteen-hour semesters back to back), as they didn't need my help as much by then and they'd gotten an "intern" of sorts to help as I finished my degree, but I returned to it in the summer of 2006, now a graduate, and now hired under WVU's temp agency for about $9 an hour. I worked it until the day before (yes, the day before) I moved out here to the midwest over Thanksgiving week that year. I miss working there quite a lot -- aside from the newspaper, it was the best, most interesting job I've ever had.
So, needless to say, I knew my former boss quite well, and so did my parents -- not only did my mother work with him in the department for many years, but his (now deceased; cancer) former wife was my parents' lawyer who helped them sort out many things in regards to the family house when they purchased it. We have a long, long history with him.
My former boss is really proud of me and what I've accomplished; he was also absolutely humbled when he found that my experience in the lab is what allowed me to teach my sections of Science/Engineering English that I teach now, so we caught up on what I'd been doing, talked about the poem I'd had published, talked about where I'm headed in life after graduation, etc. It was very, very nice. It was like old times.
As an aside, the week before I moved out here and left the job with him, my former boss gave me some of the best advice I'll ever hear in my entire life. He sat down with me in his office, and in a very serious tone, told me this: "Brandon, don't ever look back, and don't give up. You will probably be homesick and lonely, you will probably question yourself at some point and wonder if you made the right decision in leaving West Virginia and moving on with your life. Don't question it. Don't get apprehensive and second-guess yourself, or come back. You are destined for greater things."
I've kept that advice with me for many years now. It's still as true now as it was then. Even though my reasons for remaining in the midwest (then Missouri, now Kansas) are different than they were when I left, it doesn't change the fact that he was, indeed, correct about everything he'd told me.
My dad made it to the restaurant a little later, and all of us finished our dinners. My boss and his wife stuck around a little while longer to talk with him, but left shortly thereafter so that they could catch a movie. Meanwhile, I had stuffed myself with tacos and beer -- which, for future reference, is not exactly the best idea the night before one has to be on two different flights for six hours the next day -- and went next door to the video game store while dad finished eating. While there, amusingly enough, I ran into my friend Mike that I'd written a long feature article on for the newspaper back home. He's an independent comic writer/artist. I got to catch up with him a little bit, which was nice. I always tend to run into one or two people I know while I'm in town.
After dinner, we all returned home and relaxed; all of us went to bed fairly early. I fell asleep probably around 11 or so, because I knew I'd have to get up early the next morning -- we needed to be on the road to Pittsburgh by around 8 or so, so that I could get to the airport and get through security to get on my flight at noon. It's about a 90-minute drive from my parents' house to Pittsburgh. Mom volunteered to stay home with the still-sick, but slowly-getting-better dog in order to keep an eye on him, so it would just be me and my dad making the trip. I texted Lady, who would be arriving back to school that night, to tell her that I'd keep her updated on my flights, and passed out.
And so ended my last day in West Virginia, but believe me, there is much more story to come. If you thought the events were interesting before...hoo boy, wait until you hear what happened next.
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