The Beginning

***Ok... So I decided to start at the very begining b/c some of my future posts will have to do with the friends I met back then. I'm remembering this as best I can, so some conversations will just have to be summaries and not exact quotes***

In the Spring of 1986 my Dad had taken a new and exciting job that would be very good for our family. The only bad thing was.... it was over 1,500 miles from where we currently lived. We would be leaving all of our family behind to move to a state where we knew no one. Had no friends or family near, no job for my mom and at the moment, no place for us to live either. My dad went down 1st to get settled at the new job while my brother, me and my mom stayed behind to sale what we could, pack up the house and drive down. That also gave my dad some time to find us a place to live.

The house we were leaving is still to this day 1 of my favorite houses we ever lived in. We were currently living in a small town south of Pittsburg (PA) on a street that was so steep it reminded me of a 45 degree angle. The house itself had 4 stories, a 3 car garage and awesome hills in the backyard to go sledding down in the winter. The front of the house was level with the street, but if you walked straight back to the french doors in the back, it wasn't level with the back street. It was built coming out of a mountain so the basement/garage was level with the lower street in back. As soon as you walked in the front door, there was a large staircase straight ahead and off to the right. Going straight back led to the kitchen, inside the kitchen was the door to the basement, and across from that were 1 set of french doors going out to the porch. If you went left from the front door, you would walk into the large livingroom. At the rear of that room was the doorway to the dinning area and in there were another set of french doors to lead out to the same porch.

The basement was a typical basement. It wasn't a finished basement, but it did have an extra bathroom down there. Though I never recall ever using it for anything.

Going up the 16 steps from the front hall staircase, you'd turn left, go up 2 more steps and that lead to 3 bedrooms. Straight ahead was the bathroom with it's claw foot tub and pedastool sink. To the right was the master bedroom which housed a walk-in closet, another small porch and the beginings of another bathroom my parents were in the process of building. To the left from the stairs were 2 seperate bedrooms. The furthest down the hall and closet to the bathroom was my brothers room. It had it's own walk-in closet and a window that overlooked down to the front street. My bedroom was the 1st door on the left coming from the stairs. When you walked in, straight ahead was a window just like my brother's and there were 2 doors to the left. The furthest was my walk-in closet, but the closest was a door leading up to the top floor of the house.

Up there were 2 more bedrooms, each with queen sized beds, bay windows and their own dressers as well as night stands. Inside the front bedroom was a door to the attack. One thing I didn't like about that place was that my bedroom was the 1 with the door to the top floor. Since we didn't have a large family, those rooms were hardly ever used. Some nights I would lay awake wondering if someone was up there, or what would come down. But otherwise, I loved that house. Even now, when ever I go back to visit, I still drive by the house. I sit and remember all the fun times we had there. Chasing our cats up and down the stairs, sleding down the hills in the back on 2 feet of snow, my parents teaching me how to ride a bike, my parents and cousins and the rest of our extended family coming over to cook-outs, birthday parties, playing kickball in the street.

I was going to miss those days. I was only 7 (my brother was 12) when my parents decided the move would be best, but I knew then that the relationship I had with that side (my mom's side) of the family was going to change forever.

The begining of Summer, after selling all the non-essentials (piano, beds, etc) we hired movers to drive down what we kept and my mom, brother and I pilled into our little VW bug and headed south. I can't remember exactly how long it took us to get here (Florida) but I do remember looking at all the buildings and bustling people. It was so strange to me. Coming from a small town, Orlando was like something you'd see out of movie. In the town I was coming from, we had 1 McDonalds, 1 Tasty Freeze and a few small privately owned diners. 1 grocery store, but a few small 5 and dime places you could get personal items like shampoo, soap, etc with pharmacies build in them. It was like a CVS or Walgreens but on a MUCH smaller scale.

The majority of the population in our small little town was Italian or Irish. If you weren't 1 or the other.. you were a mix of the 2. I think we had 1 black family and until moving to Florida I don't ever recall seeing anyone with a Hispanic heritage. Florida however, was much different. It was a melting pot of all sorts of people and their backgrounds.

My father met us at a Burger King right off the Interstate. We decided to have lunch there (I'd never had a Burger King burger before, so my brother and I were excited) then we followed my dad back to our new place. It was an apartment. A small, 3 bedroom apartment. The good thing was we had 2 full bathrooms, unlike our house. Thank god we sold a lot of our stuff because it was the polar opposite of what we had just moved from.

The 1st few days were full of unpacking and finding bedroom furniture for me and my brother. It wasn't long before we realized how different Florida was from PA. The biggest difference was the weather. It was unbelievably hot and humid. My brother and I were very active kids, never ones to just veg infront of the TV, so we played outside a lot. That's where I met Carl and his family.

Little did I know, that was the begining of a beautiful, but rocking relationship.