I'm 46. I did payroll for nineteen years until the plant closed. Ray is my husband of twenty-seven years, handle Saguaro. Mine is Payroll. We drive a refrigerated truck as a team, coast to coast, and I write this on a laptop at truck stops that have a phone jack. If you're one of my kids, call your grandmother.

For real truck stop reviews, showers and coffee and pie, go see Big Ed's Truck Stop Reviews, Ohio to California.

Older stretches of road: January to June 1999 · 1998 · 1997, the beginning

Sunday, September 26, 1999
Written at: our kitchen table, Tucson. Not a truck stop. Get used to it.

We decided.

We're going to run through the end of the year. Every load Joel can give us, October, November, December, with time off when the baby comes. Then the first week of January, we turn the truck in at the terminal in Phoenix and come home for good.

We sat right here last night until one in the morning with my yellow pad between us. I'd made the list in Tennessee, waiting out the hurricane (see last Monday), and Ray read it twice and then he took the pen and added one thing on the "stop" side. I'm not going to tell you what it was. It's the kind of thing a man says to his wife once in twenty-seven years and you don't put it on the Internet. I'll tell you it was about the night in Wyoming, and that it was enough.

The plan, as much as there is one. Gene Terrell, who taught me at the driving school, is opening a branch of the school in Tucson in the spring and he wants Ray for the backing range. Ray Camarena, who once backed fifty-three feet of trailer into a dock in the Bronx with a garbage truck coming the other way and a man selling socks applauding, teaching nineteen-year-olds how to do it. He's going to be terrible at patience and wonderful at everything else. And they'll check his medical card, and if it ever comes to insulin, he can still stand on a range in Tucson and yell "Watch your mirrors!" No federal rule against that.

Me, I'll find payroll somewhere. Everybody needs somebody to count.

Ray says if the computers all quit on New Year's like the CB says they will, at least we'll be home for it. I said the computers won't quit. He said that's what the computers want you to think.

This afternoon he watched the golf on TV, the Ryder Cup, which he has never watched in his life. The Americans were losing badly and then they came back, and when a young man from Texas made a long putt to win it, Ray stood up out of his chair and yelled so loud Mom called from across town to see if somebody'd been hurt. He said it was nice to see somebody come from behind. I said you don't even like golf. He said, "I like this."

Three more months of two seats and one sleeper. Then two chairs and one bed, and we'll have to learn to sleep at the same time again. I don't know how. We'll figure it out. Sleep when you can, the old drivers said. Not when you want.

Thanks for reading all this, from all those truck stops. I'll keep writing till we're home. After that I'll have to find something else to write about. A grandbaby ought to do it.

Friday, September 24, 1999
Written at: home, Tucson. Got in Thursday night. Ray's checkup this morning.

Dr. Natoli says the pills are working.

The three-month number came down again. Not perfect, but close enough that he smiled, and Dr. Natoli doesn't smile for nothing. He changed the second pill to a smaller dose because of the low in August, and Ray hasn't had another one since. Good.

Then I asked my question. How long can the pills hold it. Dr. Natoli put down his pen. He said, "I can't tell you that. Some people go years, some people go a lifetime, some people need insulin in a year or two. The things that help most are exercise, eating at regular times, keeping the weight down, and less stress." Then he said, "I'm going to be honest with you both. Sitting ten hours a day and eating at two in the morning is about the worst thing I could prescribe."

Ray said, "So you're saying quit." Dr. Natoli said, "I'm saying it's not my decision. I'm saying whatever you decide, decide it on purpose. Don't let a lab number decide it for you some Tuesday."

We drove home not talking, but not the bad kind of not talking. The good kind, where you both already know.

Monday, September 20, 1999
Written at: truck stop, I-85, near Greensboro, North Carolina. Loaded for home.

We delivered in Raleigh Saturday, three days late. The produce was fine. The reefer ran the whole time on fuel the company is going to be very unhappy about.

The drivers coming out of the east part of the state have terrible stories. The rivers kept rising for days after the storm was gone. Roads closed everywhere east of Raleigh, whole towns under water, farms, hogs, people on rooftops. We saw a line of power company trucks from Georgia and Alabama going east on I-40 at dawn, thirty or forty of them, with their lights going. Ray saluted every one.

Sitting in Tennessee for two days waiting, I did what I do. I took out my yellow pad and drew a line down the middle. On the left, KEEP DRIVING. On the right, STOP. Like a ledger. I made Ray promise not to look till I was done.

KEEP DRIVING: The money is good. The house. We're good at it. We like being together. Ray loves it. I love it more than I ever say. The pills are working. Nobody tells us what to do except Joel and he says please.

STOP: Ray's sugar. The low in August. Sitting all day. Two a.m. buffets. The pills might quit any time and then the federal government decides for us. Mom is seventy-four. The baby. We are forty-six and forty-eight and I have been tired since 1997.

When I was done I looked at it a long time. I've done a lot of ledgers in my life. You can't always tell which side wins by counting. You have to look at what each line weighs.

Joel got us a load to Phoenix. We'll be home Thursday night. Ray has the doctor Friday. I haven't shown him the list yet.

Thursday, September 16, 1999
Written at: truck stop, I-40, east of Knoxville, Tennessee. Second day waiting.

Hurricane Floyd came ashore early this morning near Cape Fear, North Carolina. We're five hundred miles away sitting at a truck stop with twenty other drivers watching it on the Weather Channel.

We have a load of California lettuce and tomatoes for a grocery warehouse in Raleigh, due Wednesday. Monday and Tuesday the whole coast from Florida up to the Carolinas was leaving. People said the evacuation traffic was backed up for a hundred miles in places, cars with mattresses on the roof, and every eastbound truck with any sense was being told to sit still. Joel sent a message to the box on the dash Tuesday morning: HOLD AT KNOXVILLE. RECEIVER CLOSED. KEEP REEFER RUNNING. So we're holding, with the reefer humming behind us, keeping four thousand heads of lettuce cold for a city that's closed.

Drivers with family down there are on the pay phones. A woman driver from Wilmington has been on the phone most of the day because her mother wouldn't leave. Tonight she found out her mother is fine and at a church shelter, and the whole restaurant clapped.

Ray and I walked laps around the lot in the heavy gray air and talked about the decision more than we have all year. Nothing to do but wait and talk. Maybe that's what it took.

Sunday, September 5, 1999
Written at: home, Tucson. Labor Day weekend. The whole family in one kitchen.

Everybody was here today. Mom, Carol and her husband, Greg up from Phoenix, Melissa seven months along and Wes carrying her chair around for her like a waiter. I made the green chile stew the way Mom taught me, and a pot of beans without lard that nobody noticed, which is the whole trick.

After dinner Greg said it. He waited till the dishes were done, because he's his father's son. "Mom. Dad. Come home." He said he's worried about Dad in the truck with the sugar. He said they want us here for the baby. He said it like he'd practiced it in the car, and he probably had.

Ray didn't say anything. I didn't either.

Then Mom put down her coffee and said, "I didn't raise you to quit, Gertrude. But I didn't raise you to be stupid either." Then she looked at Ray and said, "Either one of you."

Later Ray and I sat out on the back step in the dark. There was lightning out over the Rincons, the last of the monsoon, no thunder, just the sky lighting up pink every few seconds over the mountains. We sat there an hour. He held my hand. Neither of us said the word.

Wednesday, August 25, 1999
Written at: Two Sisters, Tucumcari. The window booth. The phone jack. Home away from home.

Guess who walked in tonight. Sooner! From the blizzard, Wyoming, February of '98. I knew him from the back by his cap. We hugged in the middle of the restaurant and the waitress said "Y'all related?" and Ray said "Sort of."

We told him about Ray's sugar. He got quiet and said a buddy of his got diabetes, went to pills, then a few years later went to insulin, and that was it for his card. Lost the truck. He works the parts counter at a truck dealership in Oklahoma City now. Sooner said he's okay, he says. Sooner said, "He says that every time I see him, which is how I know."

Also: Mom says Gene Terrell called the house looking for us. Gene taught me at the driving school in '97. He's the one who started calling me Payroll. Mom took a message on the back of an envelope. It says "Gene - school - wants Ray - call him." That's Mom. Every word counts.

Sunday, August 8, 1999
Written at: truck stop, I-10, Blythe, California. Couldn't sleep. 4 a.m.

Ray had a low last night. I'm writing it down so I remember what to do next time.

He was in the sleeper and I was driving, around midnight, near Indio. I heard him moving around back there, and then he said my name in a way I've never heard, like he was asking a question he didn't know the words for. I pulled onto the shoulder and opened the curtain. He was soaked with sweat and shaking and he couldn't find the latch on the net. He didn't know where we were.

I did what Dr. Natoli said. Orange juice first, the little cans, two of them. Then glucose tablets. Then I sat with him and held on to him and watched the trucks go by and counted. Fifteen minutes and he came back. He said "What happened," and then he said "Oh," and then he said "I skipped supper. I wasn't hungry." The second pill does this, the doctor warned us, if you don't eat.

He's asleep now. He's fine. I checked his sugar twice before he went back to bed and wrote both numbers in his little book.

Here's what I haven't been able to stop thinking since midnight. What if it had been his turn at the wheel.

Thursday, July 22, 1999
Written at: waiting to unload at a grocery warehouse outside Atlanta. Hour six.

Waiting is when you think. So I've been thinking about the word insulin.

Here's what I know. Ray's on pills. The pills are working, mostly. Dr. Natoli says type 2 diabetes tends to get worse over the years, and a lot of people end up needing insulin sooner or later, and nobody can tell you which ones or when. And the day Ray needs insulin, the federal medical rules say he can't drive a truck from one state to another anymore. That's not the company's rule. That's the government's.

Somebody on the CB said Washington has been studying the insulin rule. Washington studies a lot of things. Studying it isn't a medical card.

And team means two. If Ray can't drive, I'd have to drive with a stranger or drive alone, and I already decided I won't do either. I didn't learn to sleep in a moving truck so a stranger could drive it.

I found a page here on GeoCities by a man who's lived with diabetes fifteen years and runs marathons, Low Blood Sugar, High Mileage. His kind is type 1, not Ray's kind, but he answers every odd question you could think of, and I've read the whole thing twice at truck stops. I printed some for Ray. Ray read it and said, "Marathons. Huh." That's high praise.

Sunday, July 4, 1999
Written at: truck stop, I-80, near Lincoln, Nebraska. Fireworks over the corn.

Fourth of July on the road again. The truck stop lot backs up to a cornfield, and some town on the other side of the field set off its fireworks at dark, and about forty drivers came out and stood by their trucks to watch, some of them with their dogs. A man from Maine put his radio on the hood of his truck with the patriotic music from the station in Omaha.

Ray ate one bite of my pie. One. Then he gave the fork back and walked to the truck to check his sugar. I watched him go across the lot under the fireworks with his little meter and I thought nobody in this whole truck stop knows that one bite of pie was the bravest thing anybody did here tonight.

Four months on the pills. He's lost the gut he resolved to lose on New Year's, mostly. He says it's the first resolution he's kept since 1971.

Older stretches of road: January to June 1999 · 1998 · 1997, the beginning

Folks who've pulled in here since April 1997:



Write me: [email protected]
I read my mail when I find a phone jack, so give me a few days.
10-4, and drive safe around the big trucks. We can't stop as fast as you think.

Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999