Nevada, Rural Clark County, Nellis AFB

And the Question is...What state where you born in, What City? What Hospital?  I know the answers do not quite match up with the questions, and the picture does not match up at all but all will become clear.  I was not born in a city per se, but on an Air Force Base.  Nellis AFB hospital to be specific.  Nellis is near Las Vegas, but not in it, so whenever I have to fill out a form asking for my place of birth I must write "Rural Clark County, Nevada.  I like it.  It has an air of mystery to it.   And the  mystery deepens because if you were to search for records showing my father being stationed at Nellis you would come up empty handed for he was never stationed there, but rather at Creech AFB in Indian Springs, Nevada.  We left there when I was very young but I do still have some memories of the place.    I remember going to a restaurant out on the highway.  Why it sticks in my mind has something to do with my earliest encounters with pizza but even more to do with the empty pool that was on the property.  There is something forlorn about an empty pool, an empty pool in the desert even more so.  I remember it  even to this day.  I remember going with Jamie to our friend Sylvia's house to watch the forbidden Soap Opera Dark Shadows, and I remember "watering" the giant yuccas in the front yard from the top down, and feeling like a fool some years later when I learned that plants drink from their roots, not their leaves...I remember picnics at Mt Charleston. I remember riding in  the back of a neighbors station wagon on one such trip and coming face to face with the horror of the olive loaf...that was the first realization that there is no accounting for taste.  It was also at Indian Springs that I think I was exposed to nuclear radiation from all the testing that was done in the region.  It really should not have come as a surprise when less than 20 years later I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, and 20 years after that, thyroid cancer.  What is surprising is that Mom and Jamie have managed to stay cancer free!