So...I'm driving along minding my own business, pull up to a stop light and a voice behind me yells out, "Whereabouts in Utah you from?" Over my right shoulder (it's a two lane wide left turn lane) is on old guy in a beat up pickup truck, looks like either half his teeth are missing or he left his dentures home.
I smile and say, "Salt Lake." Traffic is packing in behind us.
He yells something about Murray and the 2002 Olympics. The vehicle ahead of me starts to go. I wave at him and we both just make the light. I lost sight of him at another light but three miles further on, as I'm pulling into the library parking lot I see his truck making the same turn. So I intercepted him at the front door.
Turns out Chuck used to have his own business installing telephone equipment here in Fort Myers until a friend made him an offer he couldn't refuse (California union rates to install stuff throughout Utah, Nevada and surrounding areas) and he moved to Brigham City, living with his Presbyterian pastor for a while, before moving to the apartment complex at State and Vine in Murray where he watched the twin chimneys come down and helped out in the Olympics when he wasn't taking off to travel all over the west. He's afraid of heights and doesn't like all the new buildings in Fort Myers, the tallest of which is 30 stories, since he'd never been more than five floors up in an elevator in the old days although he'd been 90 feet up a transmission tower (where his knees buckled and he left white-knuckled grip marks in the handrail by his own account). Right now he's recovering from a heart attack and cancer so he's in unwanted retirement but as soon as he has his strength he wants to move back to Utah. He loved the dry cold and the dry heat and his Mormon friends including the family with five kids three of whom married in the temple and the Jacks in Moab who knew how to party. (He really wants to go back to Moab.)
Some days I just love people.
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