| By :
Mark Etinger
When I was a kid I dreamed of being a cowboy. Riding around on horses and living in the wild west, roaming the empty land and fighting bad guys. I had trouble in high school, it wasn't for me. I dropped out and became an auto mechanic, a truck driver and I did other odd jobs where I could get them. I lived the life of a modern day drifter, taking what I could get when and wherever I could. All that time on the road meant that I spent a lot of time in hotels. Motels. These weren't the ritzy kind with a desk blotter on the desk. Heck most of them didn't even have a desk, just a broken in squeaky bed, with a small bathroom off to the side and a plastic wastebasket in the corner. I didn't have much money at these times, so what I'd do is fill up the plastic ice bucket, go down the hall to the vending machine and get myself a soda to sip in front of the television. But eventually I grew tired of this lifestyle. I wanted a little wife, a child, and maybe even a dog. I wanted to spend nights in hotels with a leather desk blotter on the tables. So I chose a place, Waco, Texas, and took out a loan to open my own auto mechanic shop. I'd been doing it for fifteen years already. I was thirty-two. Pretty soon, my prayers were answered. I found a girl one night at the local watering hole, out with her friend, and I told her she looked like she had stepped out of a magazine. She was so pretty with big blue eyes and blonde hair, legs that could cross borders with each step. Within a few weeks, we were pretty much in love. And a year to the date after we had met, we were married. For our honeymoon we went to Hawaii for five days and stayed in a beautiful hotel. Instead of soda and ice from down the hall, we chilled a bottle of champagne in our plastic ice bucket. The desk blotter was on a beautiful mahogany table. And I didn't get cold or itchy in the middle of the night. Today, I just manage my mechanic shop. Our son Jason works with the other guys, learning the trade and I'm looking to expand. So drifting when I was younger eventually led me to settle down.
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