Hello. My name is Orville Banks. I am 66 years old, and I drove a truck for 38 years.

My grandson Travis set this computer up for me and said every man ought to have a home page. I told him I already had a home, and a page seemed like a lot to ask. But here I am.

I retired in March. By my figuring that comes to a little over two million miles. Most of them at night. Most of them alone with the radio.

My first truck was a used 1956 Mack, green, with a cab that let the cold in through the floorboards. I bought it in 1961 with money I borrowed from my father-in-law, who did not think much of the idea. I paid him back in two years. He still did not think much of the idea.

The road I loved best was 66, before the interstate came through and took the traffic off it. You drove right down the main street of every town. Tucumcari. Santa Rosa. Gallup. Kingman. You knew the waitresses by name, and they knew how you took your coffee. Now you go around those towns at seventy miles an hour and never see them. I understand why they built the interstate. I just don't have to like it.

My wife's name is Loretta. We have been married 41 years, and I was home for maybe half of them. She raised two children, kept the books, paid the bills and waited up. I never once came home to a dark porch light.

I am not a man who says much out loud, so I will put it here where it will stay. Loretta, thank you. I know what it cost.

I missed a good deal. Birthdays. Ball games. A school play where my daughter was a tree, and I heard she was a very good tree.

I have five grandchildren now, and I have made up my mind not to miss theirs. I have been to eleven Little League games this summer. I have learned more about Pokemon than a man my age has any business knowing.

The hardest part of retiring is sitting still. The first month I woke up at three in the morning and reached for a logbook that wasn't there.

Some nights I still go out and stand in the yard and listen to the trucks out on I-40. From here they sound a little like the ocean, what I remember of it. Then I go back inside to a house that is right where it was yesterday.

I find I don't mind that as much as I thought I would.

That is about all there is. If you drove 66 in the old days, or ate at a place along it that is gone now, write and tell me about it. I would like to hear.