Catfish 3

 The Old Style was cold that night and after three or four I told Mom I'd quit my job.  That didn't make her too happy.  When I told her I was going to California that made her even more unhappy. 

 "But Son, I thought you said you were going to stay here."

 "Ahhh, I know, I know," I said, "but it's just not working out."

 "You said you were never going back to Champaign again."

 "Champaign?  Why do you say Champaign?  I told you, I'm going to California."

 Mom hated Champaign.  She thought that was where I went wrong, which I don’t know where they thought I was going before.  Still it was a hard place to for me to leave once I got there, life was just so easy, and now that Mom had mentioned it, it did not seem so bad at all.  Much better to be waiting for happy hour at the Great Wall than having some old coot yelling at you for not wiping down the Goddamn candy bars.

 You know what I could do, and this was just an idea, Champaign was more or less on the way to California, I could stop there along the way, maybe I could get a good job there, make some money, just enough to get up a stake to take to California, just stay until I'd made enough money, no longer, just enough money to make my way to California.  Of course I'd never had a good job in Champaign, but then I'd never looked very hard.  And there was talk about that new nuclear plant being built just down the road.  Construction jobs, they paid a lot of money, probably wouldn't take too long, not long at all.

 And so I thought about it.  I had to say it sounded like a good idea.  But you know in my earlier plan, when I'd thought about stopping off in Champaign, that had sounded pretty good.  Be kind of nice to sit in the Great Wall and drink a few with my old friends there.  Once I was gone to California I'd never see them again, I should really spend some time with them before I was gone for good.  Really that was probably the best way to do this.

The folks didn't think so.  They even offered me a loan so that I could go straight to California, but by now I had my heart set.

There was some trouble around the house for a few days, and then I was packing up.  And that's when I put that glove into my bag.  I'd played center field in high school, and I guess it had been laying around in my old room ever since then, and it was laying on top of some stuff and well maybe it would bring me luck. I just stuffed it into my bag.