Nineteen years ago today, I came back to Texas, after having lived in Washington state for just over 21 years.
I was about to start my last semester of library school. I had been doing an online program with the University of North Texas, but had accepted a graduate library assistantship in Denton for my final semester. My hope was being in Texas would make it easier to get a librarian job IN Texas after graduation in May.
So two days before (Friday the 13th!), I'd finished packing up a ABF UPack ReloCube (6'x7'x8' high) and cleaning my apartment,* then flown to Houston the following day to pick up a 2002 Camry that my aunt, Sister Jean Marie, had arranged for me to purchase from the parish that had been leasing it. I spent the night at my sister's place, and hit the road the next day to drive to Grapevine, Texas, where my cousin Tom and his wife Karen had agreed to let me stay a while. (Grapevine is about 31 miles south of Denton).
Heading north out of Houston on Interstate 45, I could see the giant statue of Sam Houston in Huntsville from over six miles away, "which for some reason I found exhilarating," as I wrote in my LiveJournal at the time. So I stopped (the statue did not exist when I last lived in Texas), and a fellow visitor took this picture of me by a model of the face of the statue.
* So what does all this have to do with Mark's and my second romance? We'd kept in touch over the years, but he'd moved to California after retiring in 1993, so our contact was infrequent. However, while I was cleaning my Washington apartment, just before unplugging the phone to pack it away - he called that landline number. He told me that he had moved back to Texas, just a couple months earlier, to a little town southwest of Fort Worth called Granbury. I told him I was flying to Texas the next day and would be living, at least initially, in Grapevine, about an hour away from him. He gave me his new e-mail address and cell phone number. He already had my e-mail, but I gave him my cell number too - and we left it at that.... for the moment.
** And why did I title this post, "Taking a Chance"? That's exactly what I was doing. I'd left a nice apartment, a full-time paraprofessional job with a large public library system, with decent pay, good benefits, and great coworkers, and good longtime friends in Washington, to accept a short-term, part-time job (albeit also with decent pay and good benefits), with no certainty of where I'd be living after my cousin's house, and no definitive job prospects beyond the assistantship. But I needed some change to my life, and as I stated at the start of this post, I figured it would be easier to get a professional librarian position in Texas if I was already there. (Definitely easier to interview.)
So yes, I was taking a chance. And as it turned out, taking a chance on love again, too. More on that in future posts.
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