This is from a stack of partially finished blog entries that, after years of collecting dust, I do not expect to finish.  Unloved fragments, wayward children; the sort of pieces that glow briefly after the spark of a Good Idea, only to fizzle down to stubs by the time you’ve unspooled the first page.  None of them are finished, and some never even made it far enough to describe why I started in the first place. But like any negligent parent, I feel a certain, sullen responsibility for having brought them in to the world, and I don’t want to just let them die quietly in the dark of this hard drive.

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At some point in the middle of June 2010, I found myself in Albuquerque, New Mexico, having just zipped across the country with a friend from home in her little Toyota RAV4. She was on her way to a law school internship for the summer, I was hitching a ride and helping with gas - on my way to Santa Cruz where my little sister would soon be graduating from college.

I met Joe on the second leg of the trip: a train ride from Albuquerque to Los Angeles that took the better part of a bright blue day. As happens on long train rides, we found ourselves making polite conversation about our respective itineraries, which in Joe's case stretched - thanks to a conversational pivot that now escapes me - in to a fuller, more robust recounting of his life up to that point. Apart from the notes below I'm afraid I remember very few details. He was short, his hair just the grey ghost of a crewcut, and I remember him fingering a crumpled baseball cap in his lap while we spoke.

Joe's dad was born in 1890 (the same year Wyoming became a state) in Basque Country, on the French side of the Pyrenees. When he (Joe's dad) was a year old, his mother moved the family to the Philadelphia, where her children learned English alongside French and Basque. Two World Wars went by. He was already a ripe old 67 by the time Joe came along, living on the outskirts of Los Angeles with his wife and eight other children. Despite technically being a first generation French-Basque, his Dad's age (and distance from the old country) allowed Joe to enjoy a fairly all-American upbringing - quite a thing for a first-generation immigrant in southern California. He played baseball well, and went semi-pro for a few years after high school. He still remembers his whole team piling out of an old Grayhound bus at dusk to see their second used engine of the season smoking away under the hood; another casualty of a grueling schedule of away games, some as far up the coast as Sacramento.

As his twenties ran out, Joe watched his teammates fly off to spend their thirties playing in the European and South American leagues. He thought about following them, but at this point had found and married the love of his life - a doctor - and decided he would stick around San Bernardino to start a family. As their three children grew up - two girls, one boy - his wife rose through the ranks at her hospital to become the administrator of the San Bernardino Hospital Emergency room, which serviced the largest county in the country; sometimes admitting up to 500 patients a day. They stayed in San Bernadino until the girls had both attended UC Santa Barbara (what with in-state tuition being so good) and then headed east to Santa Fe, where his wife had found a job administering an ER that admitted fewer than 50 patients a day; a professional down-shift that almost felt like retirement.

His children, after finishing up UCSB, went on to pursue dramatically different paths. His youngest daughter opted to join the military, and has toured in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He's proud of her, but worries that she doesn't spend enough time with her two small children in Alaska, where she moved with a guy who left her almost as soon as they'd arrived. His eldest daughter, after a couple years of backpacking around Australia and Europe, used her degree in Environmental Science to get a job with the forest service in Alaska so that she could help with her little sister's new kids. Joe's son always wanted to be a graphic designer, and even attended a nearby trade school for a while, but became disillusioned after a year and dropped out. He now runs a small pool cleaning business just outside San Bernardino.

Joe, now a grandfather in his mid fifties, is still more than a decade younger than his father had been when he was born, and Joe admits that occasionally he'll find himself wondering what that must have been like.

I found myself wondering, too.