Ty grew up in a small farming town in California with a population of about six thousand people. It was located south of Fresno and in the heart of the San Joaquin Valley farmland.
Springtime in the valley was Ty’s favorite time of the year. The mornings are usually a little brisk that time of year, but by noon all you need is a short sleeve shirt. The deciduous fruit trees were in full bloom with a variety of colors as the fruit was starting to bud out on the trees. The small fruit of the grape vines were also just beginning to show signs of life. Ironically, the local farmers feared this time of year most because there seemed to always be huge wind, rain and hail storms that would hit parts of the valley floor and wipe out the tender shoots and destroy some of their crop.
One of Tyler’s favorite places to go during his teenage years was Cho’s Kitchen that was located next to the railroad tracks and across the street from the Post Office. It’s an old fashioned place with a couple of walk up windows where you can order from outside and then sit on one of the picnic tables out front while you ate your lunch. On the east side of the building there is an attached dining room area where you can go inside and sit at the tables, if you chose to eat inside. That was good for the rainy and cold months. It has several small tables inside and a couple of larger round tables where you’d usually see four or five prominent town people having lunch and talking about their day. Some of the customers would just go there to have coffee in the mornings and visit with friends. As Ty got older and he worked at the Fire Department, he and some of his buddies would sometimes go there for lunch.
One of Tyler’s favorite things to do when he was in junior high school was ride his bicycle the few miles into town and order one of Cho’s big famous hamburgers with thick potato fries and a butter pecan milkshake. Sometimes he and his buddies would meet at Cho’s, have lunch together and gossip about all the pretty girls from school, before he rode back home.
This was the place where Ty first met Maggie. She was in the eighth grade and the same age as him. She was from Clovis, California just east of Fresno, but only about ten miles from his home town. She was visiting one of her good friends on the day they met. They had gotten bored with things at home so they decided to walk to Cho’s Kitchen to get a soda and hopefully run into a few boys to talk to along the way. When he first saw her Ty thought she was really cute, but she seemed real shy. The shyness was actually one of the things that Ty was attracted to.
He didn’t see her very often after that first meeting, but he often thought about her. He was able to run into her and have a few good visits at Cho’s Kitchen during their high school years, but they didn’t date each other until they met later in college. Maggie was studying to be a nurse and Ty was majoring in political science. He wasn’t crazy about his major, he just wanted to be a regular guy. He’d always wanted to work as a fireman since he was young, even though it didn’t require a college education.
Tyler thought about how a place like Cho’s Kitchen could hold so many precious memories. As he sat at the picnic table outside with his new friends Markus and Holly, he didn’t realize how much he truly missed this place until that moment. His existence was so much different now. He was now what he once feared most, “A ghost!” It was now hard for him to stroll down Main Street and to sit at Cho’s Kitchen and see people he knew so well just walk right on past him without even seeing him. He stared off into space as he said, “This sucks! I wonder why my guardian angel wasn’t there when I needed her most. Maybe she was busy or maybe she was texting her friends?” Markus almost laughed but held it back as he looked at Tyler and replied, “Why, what do you mean bro?” Ty answered, “She didn’t even try to warn me about the stop sign that I ran.” In a soft voice Holly replied, “Maybe there was nothing she could do to stop it. Maybe it was just your time to go.” Tyler rolled his eyes and replied, “Yea, maybe so.”
Ty looked at Markus and Holly and said, “Now what?” Markus replied, “What do you think about us showing you the portals to the parallel world of the Alien dimension?” Tyler just smirked and said, “What else do we have to do? We’ve got all the time we need.”