Starting Over

For a while, when I was a teenager, I kept a bag packed for running away from home. Stoked by Huck & Jim’s story and in anticipation of a definitive disagreement on the home front, I kept the blue Sabena bag in my closet.

I can’t remember now what was in it, besides cans of tuna fish and a change of clothes. My plan was to hitchhike to Toledo and then start over.

But things at home were fine and the angst and anger I had read about never really got traction with me. My folks were easy to get along with. And the lure of the open road was tempered by the thought of all those cans of tuna fish.

Things never got so bad that I had to start over. But its good to know you always can start over. That’s perhaps a better way, today, to describe being “born again.” Many people are resistant to those wonderful words, because they’ve been loaded with political meanings. But “starting over” doesn’t carry the same baggage. It seems easy to me to ask someone, “wouldn’t you like to start over, today?”

-posted from Dallas

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