FROM LAS VEGAS BACK TO TAMPA

It’s twenty-three hundred miles from Las Vegas Nevada to Tampa Florida which gave me plenty of time to think about how I was going to handle showing back up. I came up with nothing so the decision was made for me by running out of time and miles. I decided the best answer was to just not let anyone but my parents know I was in town or in others words, I was still running.
My family’s plant nursery was back up and doing pretty well, no thanks to me. In the beginning, I had invested almost half of my bonus money from the Redskins in the business, but after two seasons we went belly up. My parents were both great plant growers, but neither they nor I were even adequate business people. I really never liked the nursery business anyway so I left it with them and went in search of greener pastures. My parents stuck it out, borrowed money to produce the next crop and were doing pretty well now.
All that to say, my dad turned over his, two days a week, route sales to me on commission. At least I could make a little money while I studied my Astrology, drank beer and tried to make room in my head for the cosmos. At that point, I would still rather have been sticking my helmet in the chest of a quarterback and feeling his body quake as I drove him down on his back.
However, confusion reigned, I faked confidence, my dad said very little, and my mother, I’m sure, would rather have been reading a story about me in the sports pages than reading the cover of one of my technical books on Astrology, but all three of us were born in hard times, so hard times didn’t rattle us. We just carried on.

Jack