Where does the time go? Why don’t I devote real time to keeping in touch with the people who mean the most to me… those where the emotional ties run bone deep. Its definitely perverse in a way. Its that “Important, but not Urgent” category of life’s task list that is so hard to get right. Obviously, this is the reason that sites like Facebook and MySpace are the social phenomenon that they are, providing us an easy way to maintain a connection that your busy life my not otherwise offer much time for.

So Ken, still the most extraordinary cook out this collection of Village Inn Pancake House alumni, broke out the Rib Eye’s and the NY Strips, organized a baked potato bar, threw together a delicious green salad and fed us a great meal on the back porch of his house in the foothills. It was one of the most happy and interesting evenings I’ve had in many years. Thanks, guys. It was great catching up with everyone.

It was with a deep melancholy and, let’s face it, just plain ol’ Rocky Mountain home sickness, that I trudged back at the Denver airport for the trip home. And I confess that when it was looking like Frontier Airlines was going to bump me from their only flight of the day to Orlando, I wasn’t all that upset. One more day in big sky country, granite and pine… there are a lot worse places to be stranded.

Settling in at the Ramada Inn on West Colfax for the first week as we waited for our new house to be available, it all became too much for my mother one night. My dad came into the kid’s room and told me he was taking my mother to the hospital. She was having some sort of anxiety attack. At 12, and the oldest, I was therefore in charge until their return. I spent about 5 minutes fretting about this and my mother’s status before falling promptly back to sleep. You can only expect so much from a 12 year old.

In time, we left the Ramada and moved into our house in the northern Denver suburbs, just a block shy of the Thornton city line. From my perspective, life in Denver was a vast improvement. There were no sand storms to withstand, no tumbleweeds to dodge, and grass actually grew on the lawn without much prompting. In Albuquerque our yard was mostly sand, front and back. With sodding after sodding, we never managed to get grass to take hold in that sand and clay for more that a few seasons.

Our neighborhood was far more affluent than where we lived in Albuquerque, though still solidly middle-class in nature. The local elementary school was again within walking distance and there were great new places to explore on my bicycle. One of my favorite places was a small roller skating rink about a mile from the house. Outside the building was a Coke machine that kept the pop so cold that it was partially frozen. There was nothing that could beat that particular treat when you were hot and sweating from riding up and down the roller coaster bike trails of Welby hill.

In my first five years of school in Albuquerque, I was decidedly at or near the top of my class is nearly every endeavor. My first year of school in Denver, the 6th grade, was decidedly different. I found myself playing catch-up in some subjects and school actually became a challenge for the first time. I remember in particular having great difficulty with Spanish class. You would think that coming from Albuquerque, with daily exposure to the language, I would have some good Spanish skills under my belt already. But the words I knew were mostly schoolyard taunts and profanity and, unfortunately, those words were not on the tests. It also didn’t help that the Spanish teacher was a humorless and stern task master. And in Spanish class there was far more effort required outside of the classroom than in any other class.

So I struggled and struggled, barely achieving a passing grade in Spanish by year-end. Its interesting to me that my Spanish teacher and that class are my only real recollections I have of that school year. It was my wake-up call, I guess. I recall seeing a tear in my Spanish teacher’s eye as we said goodbye at the end of the year. The following year would see me at the junior high. I guess he really wasn’t as stern and tough as I thought he was.

Having a very competitive nature (ha, my wife would laugh at that understatement), I was able to close the gap in time and get back to the top, briefly, before the disaster of puberty struck and all hell broke loose. Ah, but that’s a different story…