I said it would happen even before the rumors started.

Everybody told me I was looney.

Delusional. Crazy. Whackadoo.

And not in a nice way.

They said it was impossible. It couldn’t be done.

By anyone.

Let alone by Apple.

They said tablets would never be able to do all the things they can now do.

Pipe dreams, they said. Who do you think you are, anyway?

I said the same thing about the phone.

I told everyone Apple was gonna make a phone.

It was inevitable.

Again, I was ridiculed.

Head in the clouds. Pie in the sky. Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.

Today it seems obvious.

But when I first started spouting off about it, nobody believed me.

That was when I was in grad school. Circa 2003.

Even before that, I knew.

This is not a sob story. Or a pity party.

And it is not about naming names or sticking it to all the ghosts and villains of the past.

Although some names are named. Mostly the neutral characters who pop up now and again.

This epic saga journeys into far deeper caves than that catty superficial nonsense.

It has a greater meaning. A greater purpose.

One that will become more clear as the story unfolds.

Hopefully.

If my squirrelly stream of consciousness can maintain focus long enough to get to the punchline.

So here goes nothing. Break a leg and all that jazz.

Once upon a time… Just kidding.

OK, for reals…

In 1998, I devised an elaborate plan to strap a camcorder to myself and solo backpack around the world.

Every single country. Even the scary dangerous ones.

Because I didn’t know.

I was a language and geography buff.
Who wanted nothing more than to get out of Dodge.
Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

I was enamored with globes and atlases and those paper roadmaps everybody stuffed into the glove compartments of their cars.

All I cared about at the time was that all these places were on the map.

And I hadn’t been there yet.

So I wanted to go.

And I wanted to document all of it.

What we now call live streaming.

But there was no such thing as live streaming.

I might as well have tried asking Scotty to Beam Me Up.

To add insult to injury, almost everybody said it was a really bad idea for a girl to travel alone.

That I’d most certainly be raped. Or kidnapped. Or murdered.

And inevitably end up naked in a ditch somewhere.

With nobody nearby who could identify the body.

Now it was my turn to tell them all, in no uncertain terms, that they were the crazy ones.

To prove to everyone who had mocked me that the world was beautiful. And worth exploring. Thoroughly. As much as possible.

No matter what the fear mongers would have us believe.

And that I could do it. No ditches need be involved In the matter.

There was only one problem.

The technology didn’t exist yet. Not even close.

The underpinnings were there. Enough so I could see it coming from a mile away. Even at nineteen.

Fresh out of the cornfields of rural Iowa and hopelessly optimistic about the infinite possibilities that lie before me at that moment and in that concurrent timeline of my life.

Ok, so, actually, there was more than one problem.

One of them was a biggie. Like huge.

Money.

I had barely two pennies to scrape together.

Always the peskiest of problems for me.

Since the day I took my first breath of stale hospital air.

Even before that, actually.

My biological father flew the coop.

Six months before I was born.

Literally skipped town.

Landed more than 2000 miles away.

Not a peep from him for more than a decade.

No child support. No birthday cards. Nothing.

It was very hard for me at school.

I was teased and taunted and tormented.

Ruthlessly.

Someone who I thought was my friend even told me that her stepmom told her I was a mistake.

It happened while we were moving through the lunch line in the school cafeteria. Arguing about politics. No joke.

She told me she had voted for Mondale. That he should have won. But he lost. And she was unhappy about that.

So now she was going to vote for Dukakis.

I said I was voting against Dukakis. Mondale, too.

Because my grandpa said so. And he was the smartest man in the whole world.

We went back and forth for a while.

Then she told me I was wrong. She knew I was wrong.

Because I was a mistake.

Nah uh, I told her. I was not a mistake.

Yes I was, she said. She said her mom told her so.

Because I didn’t have a dad.

I wasn’t supposed to be born.

I was only seven years old.

Many years later I learned that the same woman went on to become a Public School Superintendent.

I was gobsmacked.

It seemed so counterintuitive to me.

Rewinding back to 1985.

Very soon after, I puked all over the desk of the boy sitting next to me in Mrs. Culbertson’s 2nd Grade classroom.

Completely destroyed the artwork he had been drawing. With my vomit. Yes, I did.

I’ll never forget the look on his face.

He was furious. In the way only an artsy fartsy seven-year-old boy can be when a socially awkward geek of a girl barfs all over him in the middle of art class.

His grandparents were friends with my grandparents. They even had houses next door to each other at Lake Ponderosa. Near Montezuma. Where we had to go if we needed to buy absolutely anything other than bait or tackle.

Probably pretty expensive nowadays. And crowded. But back then, it was still quite quaint. A very inexpensive way to spend holiday vacations.

I used to love hanging out with his grandparents in their cabin when mine were busy handling other things. While all the other kids were playing on inner tubes in the lake.

His grandpa was a supercool dude. So much fun to hang out with. We called him Charlie Brown. Because he kinda looked like what we imagined Charlie Brown would look like if he ever grew up and became a senior citizen. Only he was much happier and much funnier. Like I said, supercool.

My grandparents had built a tiny cabin there where we used to go in the summertime to spit watermelon seeds off the side of the deck and catch sunfish, croppies, and trout from the edge of the rickety old dock.

It was painted red.

Or at least it used to be.

Before the color started fading and chipping away. It was probably more like a grungy distressed burnt reddish orange, to be more accurate.

I’m pretty sure it was meant to be the same color as Charlie Brown’s house next door.

His wife’s name was Evelyn, by the way. Same as my grandma.

Anyway, I had known this kid practically since birth. He is a brilliant musician. Saxophone player. Drummer. Class clown. He eventually became our Valedictorian. We were even born and baptized into the same church.

I distinctly remember the janitor sprinkling that gag-inducing pink powder all over the place to soak up my prolific puddle of vomit.

Do they still use that stuff today? Heck if I know. But it was almost worse than the vomit itself.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that year was pivotal for me in a lot of ways.

It was yet another series of bricks stacking up on the wall I had been building around my heart.

To protect me from further rejection and isolation.

Unconsciously, of course. Again, I was seven.

I struggled with so much social anxiety because of it.

Trying to figure out how to be good enough to make the kids stop laughing at everything I did and everything I said.

To make the constant barrage of cruel singsongy mockery stop.

Even for a day or two or three. So I could feel a little more normal.

”Cryyy Me A Riverrr…” 🎶

One particularly mean girl made fun of my underwear in front of an entire school bus full of classmates. She had already been doing that in the locker room for months. But by doing it in front of the boys, too, she had reached a whole new level of cruel.

That same girl made it very clear how gullible I was to think she might actually come to my birthday party by scoffing with disgust while shoving the invitation back into my hand unopened the instant I tried to give it to her.

I had convinced my mom to let me invite every single girl in the class because I didn’t want anyone to feel left out.

That was the last time I ever tried to make friends with the “cool” group of “mean” girls. And kinda gave up on birthday parties altogether a couple years after that, too.

I assigned myself a new mission.

Which I chose to accept.

I became obsessed with meeting my father.

I thought I could find a way to show him how useful I was.

And he would clearly see how valuable I could be.

How important. How special. How worthy.

Then I could show everyone at school that I was not a mistake.

So I set out on a quest to prove that I belonged in this world.

And by the ripe old age of eight years old, I had already taken it upon myself to become Atlas.

Doing far more than shrugging under the weight of at least a hundred overstuffed gorillas piled up on my back like a cascade of Russian Dolls.

It took me a couple years to convince my mom to help me find him. And it wasn’t even that hard, really. Although somehow I thought it would be.

I guess a part of me had assumed there must be some other reason why he was gone. Something I didn’t know about that made it impossible for him to be with me.

At least that’s how I rationalized it in my mind to cope with the feelings of inadequacy he caused by leaving me in the dust before I was old enough to comprehend why.

His whole family lived in the next town, for crying out loud. Ten minutes away.

They all knew about me. But they ignored me just the same as he did. When his parents, my other set of grandparents, died, I wasn’t even mentioned in either of their obituaries.

It was as if I didn’t exist at all. Out of sight, out of mind.

Anyway, we tracked him down.

He had been living in San Diego.

With two new daughters.

He ended up leaving them, too. But after they were old enough to remember having lived with him.

At least I never had the chance to miss having him around.

But that little girl I was back then didn’t see it that way.

She believed in fairytales. Still does. Just not that one.

So, he ended up coming back to Iowa. For me. Or so I thought.

We met him at the Greyhound station in Des Moines at something like 4 AM. On a school day. I was too wired to sleep the night before we picked him up.

He arrived with nothing but a duffel bag. It was all he had.

It was the week before my eleventh birthday.

I was so excited. I can’t even tell you. Over the moon.

Finally. Everyone would see that I was worth something.

My dad came back. So I wasn’t a mistake after all.

He picked me. He wanted me. He needed me.

But the next couple weeks did not go as planned.

Well, not how I had planned, at least.

And I was very good at crafting elaborate, intricate, and arguably batshit bonkers plans.

For a middle schooler.

If I do say so myself. And I do.

It had become a way of life. A survival mechanism. To calm my hyperactive nervous system and nurture my overactive imagination.

Moving right along…

My dad had this rusty old pickup truck.

The kind that was burnt orange with the white stripe that runs along the middle.

A high school friend of mine drove one just like it. Only his was blue instead of orange. And far less rusty.

You know the ones. They were all over the place.

From the 70s, I think. I’m not a car expert.

Anywho…

Budding little entrepreneur that I had been becoming, I had this perfect plan to show him how valuable I was to have around.

So I decided to wash his truck.

I negotiated a fee of five dollars. In 1988.

I was super proud of myself. I was going to be rich.

It seemed like a windfall beyond my wildest dreams.

It wasn’t about the money, though. Not really.

It was so much deeper than that.

Feeling needed. Feeling wanted. Feeling useful.

Deserving of love.

I put on my swimsuit, grabbed my supplies, and proceeded to do my best Mister Miyagi impersonation for the next several hours.

Barefoot.

On a large rock driveway.

In the blistering sunshine…

Not only did I wash the truck, I waxed it, too.

By hand. Like Karate Kid. Wax on. Wax off.

Only I was not Karate Kid. I was a tiny little girl.

With a bucket of water, a garden hose, and a dream.

Climbing all over that old truck as if it were a jungle gym.

And I was ten. Almost eleven. Pushing twenty.

I must have worked for at least six or eight hours that day.

Until that truck was so shiny and clean you could take a bath in it.

My arms were killing me. My feet were all scratched up. And I was burnt to a crisp.

Looking like Rudolph navigating an arctic blizzard on Christmas Eve.

In Iowa. In May. Not a cloud in sight.

But I was so proud of myself. Grinning from ear to ear.

Surely my dad would love me now.

And stay with me forever.

So I ran into the house, where he and my mom had been watching TV all day while he was visiting.

I grabbed his arm and, with all my mighty strength, literally pulled him outside to examine the finished product.

He seemed only mildly impressed. But I was undeterred.

That’ll be fiiive dollars, I said. As a matter of fact.

I held out my hand, waiting to be paid for a job well done.

He smirked a little. As if he had expected me to forget.

He pulled a checkbook out of his back pocket.

For real. Not kidding.

My father wrote a check for five dollars. To a ten year old.

I’m not gonna lie. I was a little flustered. But not too bad.

Because I had seen grandpa write checks all the time.

And remember, he was the smartest man in the whole world.

So nothing to worry about. Right?

Right?

This story is not finished…

This little snippet is only a small part of a much longer epic saga…

Updated several times over the past couple days…

Stay tuned for the rest…