When I decided to end my hiatus from journaling I opted to modernize my routine and go the blogging route. So before I did anything I had to come up with a name..   Somehow "Prairie Rambler"  came to me and the name fits on so many levels: I grew up in Kansas(Click for map), hence the Prairie; and I have been accused of being long-winded with a tendency to ramble so Rambler seemed to fit.


The Prairie Rambler name can also be attributed to my father. My father loved to tell stories and he often told us about what he and his brothers did for entertainment in the farmlands of central Illinois. (Click for map) To spice things up a bit, the Hinton boys would mount the mud-tires of the Ford Model-T backwards so they would make a loud noise when the drove to town.... The townsfolk nicknamed them the Prairie Ramblers.  Boy, they sure knew how to whoop-it up back in the 1930's.

My journaling career began during my sophomore year of high school (1972). That was when English teachers put more emphasis on content;less on punctuation and spelling. (A real godsend for me.) On top of reading stories like "Lord of the Flies" and "Death of a Salesman" we were required to write in a journal. Every week, I would jot down things that were going on in my life. I probably wrote about things going on at home. (Pending divorce, high school, sister's at college) But I'm sure also wrote about my infatuation with Margaux Hemingway and other schoolboy crushes.


I liked writing these so much that I continued to turn my journals in to my sophomore teacher throughout my the rest of my high school career. My writing continued in college, where I chronicled some of my coming-on-age experiences but it kind of trailed off as the years went by. (Some of those college era notebooks still exist.)   But as the years went by I kind of got away from writing. I can only remember one epic letter that I wrote to my best friend about my becoming a father and moving to the suburbs of Connecticut (Click for map)


Many things have happened if my life since then (some good, some really good & some bad, some really really bad), but all-in-all life's been good (Life's been good clip)
I will write more later.