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Odessa, Really Wednesday, February 8, 2006 | 12:44PM

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I finally made the trip to Odessa I had been planning for awhile. In fact, it’s been over a year since I started planning, and I didn’t even realize it. It turned out to be all I had hoped it would. I got to stay with my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Thornton, and her husband Eddie at their nice house in Midland. She retired last year and they moved to Midland to be closer to their family.

I left Leander (our new house is in Leander, btw… 5 miles North of our old house) at 7:25am and arrived at Jan’s house some 315 miles away at 11:45am. There were parts of the trip where there was a definite landscape change. For instance, all of the major tree growth stopped after I passed through the town of Eden. It was essentially desert from that point on. However, we’re not talking sand-desert. This is the kind of desert where there are plants, just everything looks dead.

See, the amazing thing about the Midland-Odessa area is that they began planting certain species of pine trees years ago, and they have thrived. So there are now many trees in certain areas, and the place doesn’t look as desolate as I remember.

I met Jan and Eddie (Thornton) at their house around noon, and I almost didn’t recognize Jan at first. You have to realize, the last time I really saw her was the late 80s and very early 90s. We’re talking big, frosted hair. But now she has a very fashionable style, dark and straight. After getting my things in the house, we drove to Odessa and visited places I remembered.

I think our first stop was my old house at 5012 Conley. I could draw a floorplan of that house. While I remember things about the other places we lived, this is the place I think of when I picture Odessa as home. I can’t be sure if it was the current owners or not, but the back yard had really gone to waste. When we lived there, there was a sunroom that was enclosed and air-conditioned by a window unit. It seems someone pulled out the indoor/outdoor carpet, tore out the walls (but left the door) and gutted out most of the shrubs. This was a bit sad, because it was a really nice backyard when we left it.

Our next stop was only a few blocks away. It was my school, John Ireland Elementary. We moved away when I was 8, so I attended Permian public school for only 2.5 years, but my memories of Ireland are quite vivid. We couldn’t go in, but I looked in the windows and walked around to the back and saw the playground. It seemed like it hadn’t changed too much, but it was certainly smaller. We went out to eat and then headed back to Midland for the afternoon and evening.

The next day was Sunday, and I went to my old church, First Baptist Church Odessa. It was yet another place where I had extremely vivid memories. I wasn’t disappointed by my memories, because everything seemed almost exactly as large as I had remembered it. Unfortunately, I showed up 30 minutes late to the early service, and only caught the final 30 minutes. While at the church, I met up with my mom’s friend Jan Verlei, who knew me as a child, Curtis Brewer, the music minister who is still at First Baptist, and a whole bunch of people who were friends of my parents and who had kids my age who were my friends years ago. I also went out to eat lunch with Steve and Cindy Caldwell and their daughter Jenny, who is now a senior in high school.

I had intended on meeting back up with Jan Verlei, but time got away with me as I roamed around Odessa taking pictures. I went to Pairie Peet Park, which has been almost completely dismantled. This was pretty sad for me, because I remember a lot of the giant “toys” they had out there, and they had been deemed a safety hazard, so they took them down. A few things remained, but there was mostly open space where toys used to be. Oh, and a few years ago, they gassed all of the prairie dogs that lived out there. I thought that was pretty sad. There are still many out by the Midland airport, though.

I left Midland on Monday morning, and actually took the wrong route out of town. Instead of going Southeast on 158, I accidentally stayed 349 going due South. It only added about 30 minutes/miles to my trip. I only realized that I was on the wrong road when I was about 20 miles out of Midland, I hadn’t seen the right signs for my road, and the oilfields and desert looked different than the oilfields and desert I had seen on my way in. I must admit, I did hit 90 mph for a couple hundred miles of the trip back, but I was worried about being late for work. I mean, I only had 1.5 hours to get ready once I got back.

It was a great trip. I can’t wait to go back.

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Comments

Mom | Wednesday, February 8, 2006 | 11:40PM

Casey | Thursday, February 9, 2006 | 6:01PM

Walker | Friday, February 10, 2006 | 11:58AM

Cheryl Powell | Tuesday, February 21, 2006 | 5:53PM

Walker | Thursday, February 23, 2006 | 12:25AM

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