I did not sleep well – only a few hours and awoke with my shoulder sore as I slept in the same position which was on a shoulder I blew out many years.  Yes, it has healed My back hurt and I decided that it was a good time to watch some movies that I had purchased to replace the DVDs I gave to my students in Nakhchivan.  

Later, I borrowed mom’s car and drove around Hartford City for a little bit.  Actually, you can only drive around Hartford City a little bit because it is such a little town.  I drove to Marsh’s Supermarket.  This was another journey into reverse culture shock.  Even many of the big markets in Baku could easily be contained within the confines of a few aisles of this place.  I found fascination with the sliced bread and the massive selection of soy sauce.  I got confused when I tried to buy some cereal.   There was a total aisle set aside for it.  I remembered the little market close to where I lived in Baku having usually had a choice of three – a bag of corn flakes, Nestle Kosmonaut cereal and some chocolate Nestle cereal.  Suddenly I had choices of so many cereals that I just grabbed one and kept moving.  I went to the check out aisle and found the debit machine to be a wonderful thing but a little weird to operate.  After dropping my groceries off in the car, I walked over to the YMCA, which was in the same building as the grocery store.   As I was getting ready to walk across the crosswalk, there was a car coming.  I instinctively stopped.  After two years of conditioning that all drivers are possible homicidal maniacs bent on running over any and all pedestrians who would have the mere inkling of walking in front of them, I really did not trust that little old lady behind that silver Cadillac even after she waved me over.  I crossed the parking lot driveway staring at the lady with a look that was a combination of shock, disbelief, fear and uncertainty while side stepping all of the way.

I could not sleep and ended up going outside to watch the storm that was passing to the east.  I decided to try to take some photos.  It is always dark out in the boondocks of Hartford City with only a few pole lights on the few farms along the country road where my mom lives.  I set up my tripod on the first the lawn and eventually on the road.  I set everything for a long exposure hoping that I could capture a few lighting bolts, but most of the time I shot with a 30 second exposure and nothing happened.  While waiting for the card to process the shot an incredible bolt of lightning always seemed to reach out from the dark heavens to the ground below.  Still I got a few decent shots before the storm seemed to calm and I went to bed.

This is a combination of journals that I wrote during that time along with my own memories.

Today is my last day home.  I will leave this evening, get a hotel room close to the Indianapolis Airport and fly back to my other home across the ocean, leaving early tomorrow morning.  The past two weeks have been surreal with a combination of jetlag, sleep-deprivation and the adrenaline of knowing  that these moments will be the last moments I will ever see my father alive.  The one of the worst things is everything that I have waited to get done now that I am back in the States has all come down to today. 

Last night I was able to see one of my best friends from high school.  Three of the five of us who made up my clique from that period in life still maintain some semblence of contact through the internet.  Chris is the only one of the five that still remains in little Hartford City.  I have no idea whatever happen to Doug, but Terry is making his fortune in California, Craig has found some fame as a cartoonist unfortunately fortune has not followed him, and I am the nomad of the group.  Chris is a good guy, married with four children.  He might be one of the few vegetarian athetist republicans you will ever meet.  It was good to see him however briefly and talk about the Colts' next season as opposed to death. 

I spent part of the morning photographing the vast and swelling emptiness of a no-name town caught in a place extremely few seem to know and even less have the urge to discover.  There are miles upon miles of open space here where farms homes and barns serve as an oasis to ensure you do not feel totally alone.  If you drive fast enough down some of the roads you might feel the momentary sensation that you do have wings and it could very well be possible you can fly away from here under your own power.

Later, I visited my younger sister's gravesite.  It is something that i have never confessed to anyone before this time, but everytime I am back in indiana, I visit that site.  I cannot believe that 15 years have past.  I often wonder what the hell I have done with my life since that time.  It might be difficult to believe that I talk to her, as I am an Agnostic.  I do not know if anything can hear my words aside from the trees that grow beyond the shadow of her tombstone, but sometimes talking to the dead is a lot easier than talking to the living.  It is kind of sad thinking about it that many of us can never say the things we need to say, we have to say, to the living and it is often reserved as a confessional to the dead -- long after it could do no good to anyone except for perhaps ourselves.

I later visited my grandmother.  She is 96 and still lives on her own.  Out of all of my family members, my grandmother is that one person who I can look at and confirm that I do belong to this family.  She is easy to talk to and is always supporting.  But she looks older than she looked when I first got home and she confesses she feels bad that it is my father is dying and not her.  I tell her to quit talking crazy, she has to keep everyone in the family in check.  We just talk about everything and nothing.  That is the way our conversations always are.  A simple 15 minute visits always turns into a 2-3 hour visit where our conversations ramble.  I eventually tell her I have to get home and I will see her when I return next summer.  My brother will pick me up from home, we will visit dad and then he will drive me down to Indianapolis. I hug her and she starts to cry.  I tell her everything will be ok and I get into my dad's truck to drive home.  (This would prove to be the last time I would see my grandmother alive as she died a few months later.)

My brother and I are vastly different.  I think that every family can find someone often dubbed as a black sheep.  In my family, it is me.  And while the terminology "black sheep" often carries a negative connotation, in my family I do not think of it as a bad thing.  I am merely the family member who had to live his own life and do his own thing.  While I am proud of where I am from, for me to have spent the rest of my days there would have been the greatest sin I could ever commited against myself.   I had wings that needed to be used.  I know the rest of my family are proud of me, but i merely do not fit in.  My brother is closer to the rest of the family.  I often call him a midwestern redneck hillbilly cowboy and he would probably agree with me on that title as well.  He is tall and lanky, has some major league sideburns and is often wearing a John Deere cap or a cowboy hat.  My interests have always been music, writing, art and travel.  His interests are 4-wheel drive trucks, farming, beer drinking and basketball.  Yea, we are different, but even with that difference we are still brothers.  It seems like kind of a miracle that we are in the same family.  And while we are not brothers by blood (I am adopted), we have a brotherly bond even if it would be difficult for me to imagine either one of us haging out with the other if we were not brothers.  Still, I do go four wheeling with him and he will listen to me talk for hours about traveling or will visit a museum with me.  i hope we have both grown from those experiences

My brother is running late, but when he comes we talk the entire way to the hospital.  it is small talk or as it is commonly called here "shooting the breeze."  We stop by a drugstore along the way and i buy somethings as it will be Father's Day on Sunday.  I buy a toy flower to brighten Dad's drab hospital room a little.  The way i look at it, it will not need any water or sunlight, it might be the perfect plant.  I buy a card as well.  Funny, i have not gotten him a card for Father's Day in years.  This will be the last time.

My brother and i spend a few hours in the hospital.  Dad is not doing too well.  He is really weak and the combination of cancer and painkillers has given him an almost child-like mentality.  Maybe being child-like before death is a blessing, afterall most of us consider our childhood to be one of the most wonderful times of our lives.  I remember looking through this old photo album of dad as a child through his time in the military.  He looked happy when he was little, it was not always something that i often saw from him as a father.  It gets to that point where we have to leave.  I have this deep feeling of dread in my stomach, knowing this is the last moment I will ever see him or hear him.  This is a final goodbye.  I choke down any urge to cry and tell him "to quit harassing the nurses and to be nicer to mom" as i hug him one last time.  He hugs me back and says "ok" and then starts mumbling something no one can understand.  Mom hugs me and ask me to return home for a visit next summer if i have the time.  i promise her that I will.  My brother and i leave and there are hot air balloons in the air as some festival is taking place that weekend.  We do not talk as much on way down to Indy.    

Since coming back to Indiana, i have not been able to sleep for longer than four hours.  And those four hours are only possible with a combination of sleeping pills and Calm's Forte.  I do not know the cause of my inability to sleep.  It could be the stress of knowing this short period of time that I am home will be the last time I see my father alive.  It could be a bad case of jetlag.  It could be this total feeling of surrealism that I cannot believe that I am here in this moment -- that I will wake up back in Nakhchivan.  It could be that deep down inside I know that I need to be awake to support the rest of my family.  I guess it could always be that the next farm down the road has roosters who practically scream every morning when the Sun rises.  It is probably a combination of all those factors along with several others.

My brain has started to play tricks on me.  Over the past 8-9 days (anymore, i cannot keep track of the days), i have gotten a total of around 24 hours of sleep.  There are times I see things that are not there or think something is moving when it is not.  Colors are more vivid and my fascination with common things likes trees and the space between leafs seems to come on constantly.  I wonder if this is how ADHD feels.  I have gotten to be a little more quiet than usual.  But still I am trying to do everything that i can do.

In the mornings, by the time I awake, my mother is usually gone to the hospital.  I am trying to be a good son and doing things around the house that she just does not have the time to do or were things that my dad use to take care of.  By late morning, I go and run any errands that mom needs, and by the late afternoon i am in the hospital to visit my father.  The doctors have him very drugged up and their goal is to keep comfortable until he dies.  I consider how it feels to be waiting to die.  What goes through one's mind to know that this idea of endless tomorrow is merely a farce that the one thing that we all can say we will do in our lifetime is just around the corner?  He recognizes me but at the same time he does not know what is going on around him.  It must be a combination of the cancer, the pain and the medicaton to help relieve it. 

A few days ago, a doctor told him how little he had to live, which I considered to be mistake.  Doctors have been wrong before and might wrong again. Dad freaked out over the news.  My mother decided to not tell him that chances were slim that he would live because she did not want him to give up hope.  But i think he knew he was dying, the words from the doctor just confirmed his own suspicions.  And no matter how much we all want to face death bravely and how much we realize that we can die at anytime, knowing it is coming soon has to be a shock.  Everyone cried except for me.  I am almost shocked at how calm i am through all of this myself.  When everyone cried, i was the one yelling at my dad to quit being a wimp and that if he was going to beat this thing he had to have his mind right.  He told me the same thing when I was close to death myself after military doctors misdiagnosed a medical problem for six months.   But i am merely playing a role of the rock of the family.  I did the same thing when my yonger sister was killed in a car accident about 15 years ago.  The fact of the matter is I am probably weaker than the rest of them, but I just cannot show it.  Because if I, the risk-taking, thrill-seeking adventurer of the family, lose it, if I, the former paratrooper and first American to ever live in Nakhchivan, starts crying, then everyone of them, every single member of the family would have confirmation that there was no hope.  No matter how badly things seem and no matter how dark our present situations may be, we always try to find soemthing to find hope within.  If i break, the rest of the family will too.  I just cannot let that happen.  If anyone ever asked me, i would tell them that it takes a lot more strength to let your true feelings show.

I leave the hospital around 2-3 in the morning.  it is about a 30 minute drive to get back home.  The sheer quietness of the evenings and blanket of stars which surround me is the one time everything seems somewhat normal even with my lack of sleep.

I have long outgrown the stage of dressing all in black, smoking clove cigarettes, writing manic poetry about how depressed I am while hanging out in a graveyard. Nowadays when I have the urge to dress in all black, smoke clove cigarettes and write manic poetry about how depressed I am, I do it in the privy of my own home. But I digress. If American History is your thing, the Hartford City Cemetery might have something of interest. There is a huge Civil War canon close to the entrance gates, along with graves from soldiers who died in the Civil War and Spanish-American War as well. While I try to avoid cemeteries at all cost, the canon is very interesting. Hartford City is really off the beaten path and so is the cemetery, but it might be interesting for Civil War buffs passing through the area.

While the Blackford County Courthouse would never make anyone's top 10 or top 100 places they must see before they die, it is still an interesting place to visit if you car happens to breakdown in Hartford City. The courthouse is located in the center of the city. When I was much younger, the town square was the place to be. It was always a hub of activity, but as some factories shut down, the commercial section of the city suffered. Now instead of having various department stores living the square, it is now home to a multitude of "second hand" shops, or as my grandmother always called them "junk shops." The courthouse itself was built in the late 1800s at a cost of around $120,000, which was big money back in those days. The most interesting things are the monuments commemorating the Black County veterans of the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam Conflicts. If you go, you really cannot expect much traffic unless you go during Heritage Days, which is usually in June sometime.

Taken from my memories, some of my facts could be wrong.

Small towns throughout American are scattered with stories about great individuals, be it intellectually or atheltically, who could have done more if it were not for circumstances beyond their control.  For me, this person from my memories in Hartford City was Bobby Banter.  Bobby had a speech impediment that stayed with him throughout his life.  Unfortunately, people made fun of him but never to his face because Bobby was one tough customer.  Aditionally, most people thought he was slow, Bobby did not always display his intellectual abilities because it is a lot easier if people do not think you are smart. 

I first met Bobby when I was in 2nd grade and he was in 4th.  We both had summer school together.  My 2nd grade teacher wanted to hold me back a year and I refused because I did not want to be in a diferent class than all of my friends.  Frankly, I along with the rest of the class was convinced that teacher was witch.  She was old and mean -- the type of teacher who made you afraid to make mistakes which in turn made me make more mistakes.  When anyone from my class was in a car that drove past her home at night, we could all magically see her fly on her broom against the darken sky.  My mother and teacher compromised and agreed on me attending summer school.  Bobby always threaten to beat me up during that time.  I think that it was in part that I was always the one assigned to help him with his work.  There can be nothing worse than a 4th grader receiving help from a second grader.

In high school, Bobby was a stud athlete.  He played football, basketball and baseball.  The problem was he was only about 5'7 although he was built like bulldozer.  There were three things that I remember most about him as an athlete.  The first was during football practice.  Bobby was played Guard.  I was on the scout defense, the scrubs who run the other teams play during practice to prepare the starters for the game.  My position was defensive tackle.  I was told if the OT went inside and the opposite guard pulled to merely fall into a ball on the ground to plug the gap so the running back could not get through.  Sure enough, that play happened and I saw Bobby heading at me full-steam.  I fell on the ground into a ball, and Bobby flew over me and our ragtime bunch of scrubs stuffed the starting Offense.  Instead of getting recognized for what was a great play on my part, the coaches tore into Bobby.  They ran the play several times, but knowing that play was coming made it easier for me to fall onto the ground before getting hit.  It got to the point where everyone knew that Bobby would continue to request to run that play until he hit me, so like a fool I let him hit me.  I have been in several intense car accidents in my life, some where I was lucky to come out of them alive, but I have never been hit as hard as Bobby hit that day.  He knocked the wind out of me, cracked my neck, tweaked my back and made me see stars for at least 10 minutes afterwards.

My second memory was during the finals of the baseball sectional.  The visiting team was from Jay County.  They had a hot pitcher who threw in the mid-80s.  There were pro scouts from the Cubs, Royals, Tigers, and the Reds in attendance for the game just to watch this guy throw.  The game was very tight and in the bottom of the final inning with Jay Couny up 5-3.  My alma mater, Blackford, got two runners on first and second and up stepped Bobby.  The pitch was a fastball in the high-80s right over the heart of the plate.  As soon as everyone heard the crack of the bat, the ball was gone.  It soared high over the floodlights and deep into the forest behind the field.  It would have hit the upper deck of many major league stadium.  One of the student managers from the baseball team spent several hours the next day combing the woods for the ball but never found it. Some people believe it was firmly lodged in a tree.  The opposing pitcher went on to pitch in the Royal's farm system.

In the late 70s and early 80s, traveling attractions were still common in small town America.  My third memory of Bobby was from this traveling wrestling show that featured a brown bear that stood over 7 feet tall (over 220 cms) and the promoter offered anyone who could pin the bear within 3 minutes a cash prize of $500.  The bear was muzzled and had its nails clipped. but still a brown bear is very strong.  Rumor had it that no one had ever pinned the bear.  Bobby pinned it in under 30 seconds.  I would not have believed it if I had not seen it myself.

I got to know Bobby as a person in the summer of '83.  It turned out we had a lot of common, but after that I do not know where he went.  Chances are only a few of the current residents remember his feats, which is sad.  I hope that he did not turn out like so many high school jocks spending the rest of their days in a smoky bar recounting what could have been or even worst slowly sinking into the grayness of middle age.  As for me, I am claiming that he moved to Alaska to live off of the land and wrestle polar bears full time.

Every town needs a legend.

I think that i can owe my love of animals to my mom.  She was always the one taking in runt animals and raising them to full health.  As she has grown older, the runt animals have been replaced with birds.  The entire of area of the farm (yes, you can make a joke that Old McDonald really did have a farm) has been converted to a bird sanctuary of sorts.  My father made a multitude of bird houses that sit around the outskirts of the property as serves as a home for any bird who can fit in them. 

During the winters, my parents have an adundance of bird food, corn on the cob, and anything else a hungry bird might want.  During the snow-filled months, aside from typical sparrows, the yard is littered with bright red cardinals and blue jays.  One of my favorite memories during the winter is of my old cat, Sir Oedipus Rexx III (aka Ed) (RIP).  Ed was a solid white, long-haired cat.  When snow was falling, he used to sit under the bird feeder and wait for a fresh meal.  My mom could only see him by his green eyes.  He always yelled at him and he would run off temporarily only to return.  Ed soon learned that if he kept his eyes open, my mom would yell at him, so he sat under the feeder squinting.  It was just a cat being a cat.

During the summers, the farm was filled with humming birds.  While there are several feeders throughout the farm, there is one placed on the kitchen window.  During the first year of having the feeder there, the humming birds flew off as soon as they saw a human being, but over several years the same humming birds returned (my mom can identify each one, don't ask me how).  Eventually they got used to my family and are often hovering around the kitchen window watching the humans.  They like watching my mom the most but she is the one who feeds them, so I am assuming they are watching her out of admiration.

I used to joke about my "corny" parents and their bird santuary, but there is something special about being a few feet from some wild and incredibly beatiful song birds with only a window in between.

For as long as I can remember, I have always dreamt about traveling and living overseas.  It was not too difficult coming from a small dead-end town of 5,000 in northeast central Indiana.  My family was far from having the financial means to do anything except for an occasional camping trip to a local area.  I used to believe that if I could swing high enough from my father’s homemade swing firmly affixed to a towering but dying elm tree I could see Disneyland.

For me the fascination with other cultures began for me with Godzilla movies.  Japan was the place that I instantly wanted to go after seeing a radioactive dinosaur with bad breath go crazy on Tokyo.  I still dream about making it to Japan.  Godzilla led me to watch any movie made in Japan and read anything about Japan that I could find in the local library.

It also led me to join the military.  I told everyone I was joining for the college fund, but my real hope was seeing the world.  Depending upon one’s perspective, I fortunately or unfortunately was stateside for my entire time in.  I say this as it deferred my dream, which was unfortunate, but it also made me appreciate my eventual travels overseas much more.  During my time in, I was stationed in Missouri, California, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina.  I also spent some time on assignments in New York, Florida, Washington DC, Arkansas, and Gitmo, Cuba.  This was long before Gitmo was used for what it is currently being used for.

While there were good and bad things about the military, I am thankful for the fact it gave me the love of the road-trip.  It did not matter if I was with friends or alone, the open road with music playing from the car stereo with the windows down as the wind whistled through the a car racing through a deserted piece of asphalt and tar found a special place within me.  

I am also thankful the military put nomad in my blood.  After getting out, I lived in Florida, Indiana, Washington and Nevada.  Friends have often asked why I continually moved and my response was why stay when I have seen everything here that there is to see.

I worked as Special Education teacher in several inner-city schools in Las Vegas.  While in Las Vegas I completed my MEd in Teaching English as a Second Language.  After completing that degree, I started teaching English in the evenings at the local community college to people from all over the world in addition to my usual day job.  I loved my evening job.  Aside from meeting people from all over the world and vastly improving my second language of Spanish, this job afforded me the financial means to travel overseas.  

Having met people from China and Thailand on-line, those were the first two places I decided to visit.  I could not sleep the night before my flight.  I could not sleep during the flight from LA to Beijing.  Little did I know this would be one of the least crowded international flights I would ever take.  The sheer excitement and my own imagination kept me awake for the entire flight along with the sheer beauty of the snow covered mountains of western Canada and Alaska.  I landed in Beijing and found my connecting flight to Chengdu.  I could write a massive amount about this first trip, but I think that it will come in a later blog.

I loved China and Thailand very much.  Many of my friends in Vegas were surprised that I came back.  I started exploring options for my next trip.  The following year I spent five weeks in Hong Kong; Guangzhou, China; Guilin, China; Bangkok, Thailand; Khon Kaen, Thailand; Chiang Mai, Thailand; and Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Upon my return to the States, I decided that I was tired of making excuses for the reasons why I was not living overseas, so I started searching for jobs.  One of the jobs I applied for was a Georgetown University English Language Fellowship.  I had a phone interview, but I did not hear back from them.  I started applying for jobs in China.  Several universities were interested in me.  I had one university, which was suppose to call me one night for a phone interview but by midnight they had not called.  I placed my phone next to the bed as I was expecting them to call at an odd hour with the time difference.  

At 5am, I received a call.  I awoke from my deep slumber.  The caller id read “unknown caller.”  Expecting this to be the university in China, I hurried to answer it.  Instead it was the US Embassy in Baku, Azerbaijan.  The first thing that went through my mind was where in China was Azerbaijan and if I had applied for a job there.  I was sound asleep after all.  I was told that I was at the top of their list and they would let me know if I got the position the following day.
 
The Embassy wanted me to go to Naxchivan (also spelt Nakhchivan), which is an Autonomous Republic separated from the rest of the country by Armenia.  I would be the only known native English speaker there and the first American to live there, although the later part of that statement is debatable.  

After getting off the phone, I went on-line and read everything that I could about Azerbaijan before heading into work.  I hate to admit that I did not know a lot.  I just knew it was part of the former Soviet Union.  After discussing the matter with friends of mine, I decided that I would take the position if it were offered to me.  After all, if so few people had been there, how would I know if I really liked the place unless I went there myself?

The next day, I was offered the position.  This set off a chain of events.  I did not know how much stuff I had accumulated in my life.  I sold many of my possessions and donated even more.  I sold my car and eventually my condo.  More importantly, I found homes for my two cats whom I had since their birth.  On September 4, 2006, I left the USA and went onward to Azerbaijan.