I have wanted red boots since I was 16. That was the year I saw Footloose for the first time. Ariel, the gutsy small town girl who wants to really feel alive wears the boots to drive her daddy crazy. My dad probably wouldn’t have cared at all, but I liked her because she felt bold and wild and she wanted adventure (and, of course, to dance with Kevin Bacon). I wanted to be like that.

Red boots certainly wouldn’t take me away from home or make me a different person, but they’d be a whole lot of fun.

Though the stereotypes may suggest different, growing up in a suburban area of Kansas didn’t really make cowboy boot shopping a common occurrence. I never found a pair of boots that worked. I settled for red pumas and red ballet flats, but I never gave up the desire for those shoes.

Ten years later and I still have not found the perfect pair of red cowboy boots — although, I’ve certainly expanded my search options by spending the last four years in Texas. As I’m facing my what could probably be my last year in Texas, I’ve decided this is the year.

The year of the red boot.

I know that if I put my mind to it I can find the perfect pair of red boots. Low brown heel, aged red leather, intricate pattern stitched up the side. If the boots have a story — a history — even better. While I once wished for red boots because of the sense of possibility they suggested, the chance to break out of the place I’ve always known and find the world out there waiting for me, I now wish for red boots because of the life I’ve attained.

I recently watched Footloose again and remembered the first time I watched it. I was 16 and wishing to be anywhere, anywhere, but where I was. Surely someone had made mistake. I was not meant to live my life in Kansas. I was bored and desperate to have a life a little less ordinary. A life that featured a great pair of red boots.

As I watched the movie again, sitting on my couch in my house in Houston, I liked the movie for entirely different reasons. Instead of seeing just Ariel’s plight in the movie, I saw her parents struggling with their own realities of what it means to be adults with fears and challenges while trying to love a headstrong teenager. I saw not just a close-minded small town obviously too small and pent up for the likes of characters like Ariel and Ren, but a community that loves and values its safety and children and faces the challenges of a new and changing world. I saw my experiences as an “old, lame” teacher who has to be the one to say no and a big city girl working in a small town newspaper where I learned the comfort that can be had when everybody truly does know your name.

Now I want those red boots because I found my adventure. I don’t need them to be bold or break the rules, because I’ve done that all on my own. I want them because I’m living the life I always dreamed of and one I never imagined. I certainly never dreamed I would understand Ariel’s uptight pastor father or the townspeople who burn books at the public library, but I do. With age, and four years teaching a few hundred teenagers I’d give nearly anything to keep safe, has come a little bit of wisdom I suppose.

As I set off on my next adventure, I want to take something with me to remind me of those days in Kansas and who I used to be. I want to carry the little inkling of Texas pride that has developed in me in boot form (because I certainly will not be hanging a Texas flag on my wall anytime soon).

I stopped in a small vintage thrift store on my way to Dallas last weekend and shared my red boot desires with the woman working there. She pulled every red boot she had while she asked me about my childhood, college years and why the heck I didn’t make it down to Texas sooner than now. None of the boots fit or had the right specifications, but she kept looking. While walking around she showed me a fantastic pair of brown leather boots with a low heel and beautiful flower pattern etched up the side. I tried them on out of curiosity and proceeded to walk around the store painfully debating whether or not I could justify adding this pair of boots to my collection before attaining what I was really after.

Finally, I shook my head and started to remove them while I apologized for taking up so much of her time.

She smiled “Oh honey,” she drawled, “Don’t you worry. I get it. When it’s right, it’s right. And I’d bet you’ll find your boots just like you found the life you wanted: when and where you least expect it.”

She then told me that she was expecting a new shipment next week so when and where I least expect it might be back in her shop around 2 p.m. on Wednesday if I was near I-35 between Austin and Dallas around that time.

I’ve got at least six more months in Texas to find my red boots and I’m bound and determined to do it. That’s one of the things about Ariel that I appreciated both then and now: her stubborn refusal to give in. That’s a quality that’s not changed in me and probably never will.

And one of these days I’ll have the red boots to prove it.

“How’s the baby?”

Looking up from the U-Scan computer at the grocery store, I start beaming with the pride of a happily exhausted parent.

“A month old! Today!” I reply, scampering over with pictures. “Look at the smiles!”

The “baby” in question is my restaurant, Pepperhead, and I do, embarrassingly enough, carry around pictures of opening day, and the latest happy groups and families that came in to eat, talk, laugh and enjoy themselves.

It’s only been a month since opening, day, but it’s been nearly a year in planning, plotting and arranging. Looking back a year, I wasn’t even living in the U.S.A. when my father and I started to talk about the possibility of opening a restaurant. I was working for a graduate program in Italy, with no plans for moving back to the States, and not even a flicker of an idea about starting and running a small business in my hometown.

My, how things change. My days are now filled with bookkeeping, schedules, deliveries, bills, meetings, and, of course, hostessing, which I do all day, every day we’ve been open. Except maybe tonight.

My brothers and their wives made the journey to Cortez, Colorado, to be home for Thanksgiving, something my family hasn’t done for probably seven or eight years because one or more of us had been out of the country. To allow for some sibling bonding and family time, I had arranged for a good friend (suitably, her name is Angel, which fits her role well) to fill in for me. But I can’t seem to make myself leave.

All I can think of is all the things that could go wrong if I’m not there. The cash register could malfunction. The credit card machine could jam. Angel might not be able to rethread the paper for the printers on either machine. Waitresses could be rude to her. Customers could be rude to her. I could have forgotten roughly a million things that she might need to know. Worst of all, she won’t do things exactly the way I do them, which is the crime most annoying to control freaks everywhere.

So I’m panicking. I’ve been out to my car and back to the hostess station five times to tell her one last thing. And check one last thing. And tell the waitresses (all experienced hands) one that thing. The kitchen staff has watched all of this with a certain amount of amusement. Finally, my dad pulls me into the kitchen.

“Your hostess just told off a bunch of customers, and they all got really angry and left,” he said.

“Ohmygod.  Ohhhhhhh, that’s so bad. Really?” I slump a little. I knew this was going to happen. Disaster. Should never have planned to leave.

“Of course not. I’m messing with you. Go home.” He laughs a little at me. Then he waves over Rya, my friend from childhood and right-hand man in the kitchen. “Rya, calm her down and make her go home.”

Rya gives a great hug. I try breathing and find that my lungs are working once again. My heart slows down.

“We’re fine. The waitresses are fine. It’s all fine. Go home. Your brothers are waiting for you,” he says, moving me through the kitchen and depositing me in the hall. “Go home!”

And I do. It’s a fantastic night of poker and catching up with my sibs. And the next morning, everything is, in fact, fine. Leaving my baby is a hard, hard thing, but at least the first time is over.

In the past 16 months, my puppy has visited 15 states. She’s befriended a pot-bellied pig, some horses and several friendly dogs. She’s graduated from college. She’s worked at a high school and in a newsroom. She has even begun dating a California boy.

And, yesterday, she received the most important phone call of her life.

“We’re calling back the counties,” Deb said. “Sometime in the middle of January.”

The counties. My Trego. Trego is one of 10 puppies born at KSDS, Inc., on July 11, 2008. The pups in her litter were all named after Kansas counties.

Deb, the puppy raiser coordinator for KSDS, Inc., offered me the chance to raise another puppy. She told me she’d put our letters in the mail with the official callback date. I told her I’d start crying now.

Trego is a service dog in training. I’ve known since I got her last September that she’d be called back to Washington, Kansas, to finish her training. I knew I’d have to give her up. I just didn’t know it would be this soon.

“March,” I used to tell people. “Sometime in May.”

“It could be any time between March and May… We’re not sure… I won’t get much notice.”

But not ever, “Sometime in the middle of January.”

So today I am sad. I am heartbroken, actually, because our countdown has begun too early. I have about six weeks with the puppy I used to call a “wiggly-butt pee machine.” She still wiggles her butt and shuffles her feet when she walks, but now that puppy is a dog. She’s a grown up who can fly on an airplane and ride on a train. She’s confident in crowds and is conscious of the fragility of little children. She comes when I call her and (sometimes) pees on command. I am heartbroken that this grown up dog will leave California in six weeks, but I am so proud of what she’s about to do. Our friend Lisa calls her a prodigy. She says these puppies are ready early, and that’s something extra to be proud of them for. I’m trying to believe her.

Regardless of how I feel about it, in about six weeks, Trego will return to Washington a confident, happy, healthy dog. And in about six months I will walk with her as she graduates, just like she walked with me.

And that day will make this heartache worth it.

Last night, my wife tried a food experiment. I am not a very adventurous person when it comes to food. In fact, my entire junior and senior years of my undergraduate career at Texas Tech I ate some form of chicken and rice for 99 percent of the meals that I prepared for myself. So you can imagine my hesitation when my beautiful bride decided to play “mad scientist” in the kitchen.

She wouldn’t even let me come in the kitchen; she said it would stifle her culinary creativity. But not knowing what this creativity would produce made me a little nervous, so I played Monopoly on my iPhone to occupy my mind.

When the moment of truth came, I was very pleased with the presentation. It was a simple Mexican dish, with beef and cheese layered between two layers of whole-wheat tortillas. As good as it looked, however, I knew that there had to be some “secret ingredient” lurking somewhere.

When I asked if it was just meat, cheese and tortillas, she replied with an unconvincing “Yes… and maybe something else that I will tell you about after you try it.”

I knew it! I assured her that it looked wonderful, but I would be able to enjoy it much more if I knew what her secret was.

“OK… it’s pickle juice. But I promise I didn’t use a lot, just a real thin glaze on the top,” she said with the smile that she knows can melt my heart.

“Wow. OK.” I mentally prepared myself for the task at hand. What would I do if I didn’t like it? Would she be crushed? Sad? Upset?

But all of my fears vanished as I took the first bite. It was cheesy, meaty goodness without even a hint of pickle juice. I told her over and over how good it was, and how much I was enjoying it. She said about halfway through the meal that she probably wouldn’t use pickle juice next time, and I didn’t argue. But I am looking forward to the next time she wants to get creative in the kitchen. After all, I have trusted this woman with my heart, so I may as well trust her with my stomach.

I was sitting at Tel Aviv airport, my husband next to me, my son sleeping in his carrier. It was late, and we were waiting for our flight home. I was deadly tired, but still couldn’t sleep. I didn’t mind, however, since the more common crankiness had been replaced by a pleasantly relaxed state of mind. It had been a wonderful, if short, holiday, and a beautiful wedding. It had been amazing to be back in Jerusalem without an agenda, back to all those magical places with the feeling of coming back, without the pressure of “having to see something”. It had been exciting and joyful to take my son and unborn daughter to this ancient place filled with that indescribable, extraordinary energy.

So my gaze started to lazily graze the waiting areas and shops, watching people carrying luggage and families saying goodbye to each other. My eyes got caught on a young woman sitting right next to us, traveling alone with what looked like a very large plastic covered pole. Who would go through the trouble of taking a carpet through Israeli security checks? I wondered. Why is she traveling alone, where is she coming from, where is she going? I got hooked on what I imagined to be this girl’s history, maybe because she reminded me of myself when I was traveling to Israel for the first time, or maybe just because I needed entertainment for my tired mind. Of course, being too tired and shy and feeling too ridiculous to actually strike up a conversation with her, I would never hear the real answers to those questions. But she was immersed in some paperback, and I decided finding out this book’s title would be as close as I would get to learning more about this person. So after a lot of eye straining and unsuspicious leaning over, I discerned she was reading Hugh Prather’s “Notes to Myself”. I had never heard of it, but made a note of the title nonetheless, vowing to definitely check it out back home, when the check-in process finally started and I lost track of the woman and subsequently forgot all about the book.

It was only months later, when I was looking for something completely different on the internet, that I found the note and remembered the girl at the airport who had become, in the short time in which our life’s coincided, some sort of symbol for a free and unbound life, the kind of life I deeply wish for for my family and myself. Meanwhile, I had had my second child and, since having children cracks you open in more ways than one, had re-evaluated my life, thinking a lot about how I wanted to live it for and with my family, and had finally dared to look at those life dreams and daring visions that had been safely tucked away in some far corner of my mind for fear they could disturb my comfortable day-to-day. Sensing this couldn’t be a coincidence, and following the only thing that I’m running by right now: my instincts (nothing else will help you with a newborn), I ordered the book. And indeed, when I started to read it the minute the small volume arrived in my hot, hot hands, I immediately had a feeling this might be exactly what I needed. On its very first pages, the book says “In our hearts, we can all sense the way home”. I’m thinking I have finally found mine, and how fitting that it should have found me through those intricately wrought incidences.

Last year, when our Dean of Students finished off the morning announcements by exclaiming, “Today is Veritas Vacation Day,” I temporarily lost the ability to hear out of my right ear. The girls in my homeroom screamed, paused to take a breath, and screamed some more. They jumped out of their seats and embraced each other (still screaming). They rushed out of my room, down the hall, and into the auditorium (still screaming). They stopped screaming as the choir took the stage and began to sing, but the screams hovered in their throats, waiting for one of the soloists to hit just the right note. That is the magic of Veritas Vacation Day. It transforms an all-girls Catholic college preparatory school into a Beatles concert.

Veritas Vacation Day is an annual surprise holiday at our school. No one knows when it is coming, not even the teachers. The students show up to school just like any other day. Many of them probably spent hours the night before studying for a math test. Some of them surely worked well past midnight polishing their English essays. They arrive at school anticipating that it will be just another day. Well, I should confess that many of them have become adept at predicting which day will be Veritas Vacation Day. Still, it doesn’t detract from their excitement when they find out that all classes and homework deadlines have been canceled, and an all-day carnival awaits them instead.

Even the most astute VV Day prognosticators did not foresee this year’s festivities. VV Day has almost always been held in the spring, so this year the planners decided to add to the surprise element by holding it the day before Halloween. Not a single student had any idea what was coming as they filed into the auditorium expecting to hear a speaker talk to them about drug-awareness to cap off our school’s Red Ribbon Week. There was even a projector screen displaying different facts about drug abuse. After the students quieted down, the student body president and vice-president introduced the speaker. (We will just call him John Doe.) Strangely, John Doe did not step up to the podium. He was wearing a portable microphone instead. As he neared the center of the stage, he exclaimed, “I am not John Doe, and today is Veritas Vacation Day.”

Girls leapt out of their seats and screamed as though the Jonas brothers had just showed up. My favorite part of the melee was that the ninth grade girls knew nothing about Veritas Vacation Day, but screamed just as loudly as the rest. The fake speaker brought out an improvisational comedy team to keep the girls entertained while the rest of the festivities were set up. After the show, the girls had an array of options to enjoy: an obstacle course, inflatable sumo wrestling, movies, Beatles Rock Band, Halloween-themed carnival games, face-painting, bingo and a number of other activities. They also enjoyed candy, popcorn, snow cones and hot dogs. If there is anything more exciting to these girls than VV Day, it is free food. We capped off the day with a costume contest, since the students and faculty are allowed to dress up for Halloween. I can proudly say that my Sherlock Holmes costume was a hit, but nothing beat the students who had dressed up as the Village People and led the entire school in a “YMCA” sing-along.

Every school and every job needs a Veritas Vacation Day. Imagine walking into U.S. Senate and seeing Republicans and Democrats singing in unison to “YMCA.” Imagine a high-powered law firm huddled in the conference room, eating popcorn and watching Twilight. Imagine a group of librarians screaming gleefully when their boss comes in to announce that they get the whole day off. We all just need a day to celebrate for no reason at all.