Senor Panchos Hired Illegals

Probably not surprising news, but the owner of Senor Panchos–Southbury’s favorite chain Mexican restaurant–was arrested for hiring illegal immigrants from 2008-09. The surprising part is that he had only hired 10 undocumented workers across 4 restaurants over the course of one year. My brother noted, the price of margaritas now will probably go up.

The story was sent to me by my Mom, of course: http://www.rep-am.com/News/422409.txt

Lynn’s Hallmark closed

Here’s some news from another one of those who has moved away from Southbury and CT. Since high school, I’ve lived in Maine, Indiana, Tennessee, Washington, DC, Texas, and now Virginia. I did move back for about 6 months (after grad school in Indiana) and was a substitute teacher at PHS. That scared me so much that I moved to DC!

Here are the latest tidbits from my mom:

• Lynn’s Hallmark closed in the Plaza: sadly, that means no more homemade fudge. They really did make delicious homemade fudge. Where can you get it now in S’bury?
• Betsy Stiles still makes maple syrup–and it is still delicious. Mom makes sure my supply doesn’t run dry.
• There is a vote next week on Sby Police Force: should they drop out of State Trooper program and hire a police chief

Nobody Tells Us Anything

I don’t know how it happened, but for some reason most of our friends got up and moved out of town the second they graduated. And not just out of town, but out of state! California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Georgia, New Jersey, Texas, Vermont, Indiana; all over, like we were scattered into the national wind.
I was one of the few hold outs. I stuck around close to home for years, living in Oakville, Watertown, Woodbury, New Milford, and Danbury. I got married and, thankfully, divorced. None of it really stuck. Until i decided to move 1000 miles away to the Deep South. I completed the act it seems all of our friends were destined to do, I moved far out of earshot of town.
I think that my experience in relocating is similar to many of my friends: we went in search of opportunity, found it, settled, and look back only in a fond (and not longing or regretful) way. None of us wishes to really go back. None of us are even anxious for our next class reunion.
We travel back to town to see our families, if they are still there. While we’re in town we drive by some of our old haunts and see how much has changed since we lived there. I sometimes wonder what impact we would have had on the town if we all decided to stay. We are all influential people in our own way, I wonder how our presence would have affected our little town had we remained to dig our roots in.
We didn’t. We all chose to establish our families in places that were very different from the town where we were brought up. I wonder why that is. I wonder why it seems that so many of us moved.
As a result of our collective relocation, it seems that news travels slower to each of us (me, especially). I think that we end up relying on our friends to keep up with each other and our families more than we realized we ever would. Add in a drop of social media (blogs, twitter, and well, plain old emails) and we got ourselves a hub of communication.
Have you heard any news from Southbury lately? Are they knocking down a building that we would all remember? Did they drop a housing development onto a plot of greenspace that we would all miss? What’s the story? Share it with us here.

And by the way, the consult that Mr. A had with his surgeon went well and they are optimistically scheduling the surgery to carefully remove what’s left of his melanoma and surrounding tissue. Thank you for your well-wishes and prayers. They have a profound affect on his health and attitude throughout this ordeal.

Nobody Tells Matthew Anything

My mom chimed in on Tuesday with a classic good newser/bad newser.

Good news is that my cousin Tim is engaged.

“Now the bad news …. Mr. A. has melanoma…………he’s going to a surgeon on Friday so they’ll know more about what’s going on then. I would think he’d have surgery within a few weeks because you don’t want to wait too long with this. He’s got it on his head but he had a bandaid on it last Saturday so I didn’t get a look at it. Scary!”

I emailed Matt yesterday to say, “Sorry to hear about your dad.”

His response: Huh?

Nobody had told him anything.

Which, we agreed, was fitting.

He writes a blog called Nobody Tells Me Anything.

You can read the second part of this story here at Nobody Tells Me Anything.

You are in our thoughts, Mr. A.

We are all so far away

But our moms are still in Southbuy. Has she emailed you with Southbury news lately? Email me at jeremykohler@gmail.com and I will repost it here for other farflung Southburians.