My fairy tale...except it’s true

Once upon a time there lived an ordinary, middle-class, midwestern girl. She had a bit of a wild, independent streak growing up in a suburb of Cleveland, and being a tad unconventional, she pursued her bachelor’s degree in photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. By the end of her senior year, she was working in a television studio on campus and was recruited by the Public Broadcasting Service to help develop the technology for closed-captioned television. So off she went to Washington, DC, in 1978 to pursue a career.

The group of folks she worked with at PBS soon started up the National Captioning Institute, to produce closed-captioned television programming for the networks, and she went along for the ride. Before she knew what hit her, she was in charge of things...like the offices in New York, then Los Angeles, and England. And she was responsible for a few hundred people. She was good at what she did and took her job seriously, but she always felt like she was acting – doing what she was supposed to do, not what she wanted to do.

So she shopped to ease her pain. And every time she got a raise, she bought a bigger house. And somewhere in there she got married, but she wasn’t very good at that, so she got divorced. Then one day, on another red-eye flight to London, she prayed for the plane to crash, just so she could get out of the meeting she was traveling to. And she was dead serious. That’s when she said to herself, “Self, you’d better find something else to do with your life, ‘cause this ain’t right.”

When she got back to the states, she entered the Publisher’s Clearing House sweepstakes, absolutely convinced that she would win, since she had paid her dues and then some. But the prize patrol did not show up at her door.

The morning after she found out she had not won, she left on a week-long ski trip to Telluride. She rode the chairlifts with a lot of interesting people, several of whom were ski bums who had dropped out of successful careers to pursue deep powder. “I could do that,” she thought. Except she wasn’t a very good skier. But the seed of a simpler life had been planted.

When she got back to DC, she hatched a plan. She could quit her job, sell her house, move someplace where the cost of living was less than Washington (i.e. anywhere), buy a house with her equity, find a job making 20 grand a year, and be a heckuva lot happier than she was.

Where should she go? She opened her desk diary and looked at the weather charts for various cities. Hmm...four seasons...but winters that weren’t too harsh...low cost of living...hmm... Flagstaff, Salt Lake City, Santa Fe, somewhere in Texas. She eliminated Salt Lake City right away, thinking she wouldn’t fit in. Her hair wasn’t big enough for Texas. She learned Flagstaff had more fast food restaurants per capita than any place in the country...not her scene. Santa Fe? Whoops. The one place where the cost of living was higher than DC. What was close to Santa Fe? Albuquerque... Albuquerque?

She played hooky from work for the first time in her 14-year career and made all the arrangements to go to Albuquerque the following weekend. She told a few of her closest friends. One of them said, “I can’t believe you’d do this, but if you do, I’ll buy your house.”

Off she went to Albuquerque on a Friday morning in early March 1993. She arrived and saw the mountains that bordered the eastern edge of the city, took a deep breath of the clear air, and decided, “Yep, I could live here.” For a woman who could read a menu for an hour and still not make up her mind what to order, she was making life-altering decisions at warp speed. But it was easy, because she knew in her heart it was right.

To be continued...

Click here for Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.