Chapter 4: Out of SYNC

Eleven seconds! Eleven damned seconds. That's how long it took for my life to fall apart. Before the eleven seconds took place I was happily married and living with my lovely wife of twenty-five years in satisfaction and comfort in our upscale house in the lovely Cherry Creek neighborhood in Denver. After the eleven seconds—but not too damn much after—I was living near my son in a less than no-frills one-bedroom house not too far from Adams State College in Alamosa. I'd had my suspicions about Jenny, but that's light years away from knowing. Now I knew and I was truly pissed!

The whole thing was really my son's fault ... though later we spent many long nights and cold beers arguing the point. David took after me: we were both tall and slender and definitely serious runners. The difference was that while I'd been one of the best runners in the state while in high school, David was one of the best in the country. The assistant coach for the Olympic team was the coach at Adams State. David had run into him a number of times at invitational cross-country meets and wanted to be on his team. I mean this guy was a multiple time Cross Country coach of the year!

A full-ride scholarship made it a lot more palatable to me. It worked well for David too; he was interested in their award-winning program on Human Performance & Physical Education. He hadn't decided on whether he would major in Coaching or in Exercise Science & Sport Administration but there was no need to make a decision for a year or two.

When your life falls apart you tend to later go back and look for the one thing that led to various other things that eventually ended in catastrophe. At least I was like that. Which of the many events, the decisions made and not made, the fork in the road taken or not taken, led to a total life change for me? For example, if I had decided one day to buy a lottery ticket and it turned out to be a loser it would have negligible impact on my life. If I had purchased a ten million dollar winner ... well, that certainly would have led to many changes in my life.

Now you can really take this too far. If Columbus had died of scurvy before his discovery of the new world, would I have wound up living in the San Luis Valley near my twenty-five year old son?

Or maybe, more to the point, if my girlfriend, Mary Lou Fossett had not come down with chicken pox three days before the senior prom, would I have still met Jenny Wilson—who later became Jenny Johnson, wife of Jack Johnson. That just leads to too many "what ifs"?

No, if I were really going to track down the one single event that ended my so-called happy marriage, it would be my brief and seeming innocuous (at the time) conversation with my son. It took place in mid-July, just a bit over a month before he was to move to Alamosa.

"Dad, ya gotta minute? I need to talk to you about wheels."

I must have looked a tad befuddled (as usual when talking with my son), because he continued, "Dad, you know, a car. Or more specifically, a truck... your truck."

"Uh, what about my truck?"

Well, it turned out that he noticed I really wasn't using my two-year-old F-150 all that much and he felt I should give it to him.

"Dad, it would be perfect for me."

I understood that to mean he liked the six hundred dollar sound system he had somehow talked me into getting as an upgrade. But he was right, I didn't really need the truck and had been talking to Jenny that I wanted to get something smaller—something that would fit in the garage and would get decent gas mileage.

So, the end result was I gave him my truck and I went shopping for a new car. He was eighteen and going off on his own.

Jenny knew the routine by now. Whenever I started looking for a "new toy" (her words) I would kinda go through the same process. I'd get all of the appropriate trade magazines, read and compare the factual reviews, and then, in this case, go by all the dealers and listen to the blatant lies of the sales types and take the cars out for a test drive. My wife didn't seem too interested in all this. When I asked her to take a look at one of the cars she muttered something about, " ... the difference between men and boys is the cost of their toys!"

But I persevered, did the research and bought a car that turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. I wound up with a Ford Focus. The 2008 model was a complete redesign and made in the good ol' USA instead of overseas in Germany. But the really neat thing was SYNC. This was a cooperative development between Microsoft and Ford. Essentially it gave you a verbal command media environment.