Miracle on Highway 25

     It was the autumn of 1965 when my dad decided to cut ties from his secure nine to fiver in Atlanta and move our family to an uncertain future in a tiny western North Carolina mountain town. Dad loathed sameness and monotony and especially detested working for someone else. He wanted to be bold, take a risk, and make his own way in the world. And so, sight unseen; he made a deal to purchase the Bonaire Motel in Flat Rock, North Carolina.

     My mother may have been skeptical of this uncertain venture; she may have been downright terrified of taking a young family with two little kids and heading off to parts unknown. But there was no way she’d ever tell my father that. Mom was solidly in Pops’ corner, for better or worse, and would be for the rest of his far-too-brief life.

    And so it came to be that on an autumn evening in `65 we Millers packed into the family wagon and headed off on the five-hour drive to our new life. I was only three years old at the time but still remember the trip clear as yesterday. In those days, kids were allowed to bounce around a car like a jumping bean on speed, and nobody paid it any mind. There were no seatbelt or car seat laws. You could hang your body out the window and yodel at the moon if you wanted.

    It was already past my bedtime when we started our journey, so I curled up on the floor beneath the glove compartment. It was a wonderfully dark and comfy little nook, and the rhythmic clacks of the highway pleats soon lulled me to sleep.

     I awoke sometime the next morning in my new bed in our new home – which happened to be the dank basement of a quaint little roadside motel. Truth be told, the Bonaire looked a bit like Bates Motel - only no scary house on the hill. From the lobby in the main building, you looked out through a large picture frame window on a row of eight rooms just across the parking lot. The rates ranged from six to eight dollars a night.

    It was still peak autumn colors season when we arrived, so the joint was packed. And, though the first few days were a little chaotic for my parents, they were happy as clams in their new life. All was well for a few weeks…and then it wasn’t.

    The problem with North Carolina’s stunningly colorful fall is that it doesn’t last. The bright hues fade, and the leaves die and shrivel and fall. And, for my novice innkeeper parents, that fact of nature was not good news. Soon the leafy lookers had all gone home, and the Bonaire parking lot was left empty.

    My parents weren’t worried at first. They figured it was just a temporary downturn. But, as days turned into weeks and autumn turned to winter, Mom and Dad’s initial optimism faded.

     Each evening, my mother would stand in the lobby and gaze out the window at the darkened row of empty rooms. She’d watch and wish and pray.

     “Please, God. Send us guests for our rooms.”

     It was a simple prayer that she repeated again and again. Whenever a car would come rolling down Ol’ Highway 25, she’d perk up, thinking maybe her prayer had finally worked. She watched for the car to slow, to flip on its blinker and turn into the motel lot. But, despite her tirelessly hopeful one-sided conversation with God, there were no blinkers that winter. The cars kept going. 

     As the icy January of 1966 morphed into frigid February, things began to look bleaker and bleaker. My parents’ meager savings had been used up. My father was despondent. Again and again he lamented his mistake in moving us away from our safe and secure life. He talked about packing us up and heading back to Atlanta. Maybe he could beg for his old job back. Mom convinced him to wait a little while longer. She wasn’t ready to give up – just yet.

     Each night she continued to hold her fruitless vigil, staring out that lobby window at the cold and empty rooms. “Please, God. Send us guests for our rooms. We’re good people. Our rooms are clean and comfortable. Please help my family.” She knew that God was up there and that He had to hear her, so she couldn’t understand why he wasn’t helping out. “Show me what I need to know,” Mom despaired one night. “Show me the way.”

     Then a flicker of a thought crossed her mind. What if she was going about it all wrong? What if the tone of her prayer had been misguided all along? She knew at that moment that she’d had it all backwards. My mother would call this inspiration an “angel message.”

She suddenly remembered Elisha’s prayer for his servant in II Kings:

“Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.”

     My mother asked that God open her eyes. In an instant, she switched from fear and doubt to gratitude and hope. She’d been so busy asking God to bail out her family, she’d forgotten to give thanks to God for all the blessings He’d bestowed on her family. The Millers had so much to be grateful for, and she really had no business asking for more. She knew this was the answer to her prayers. Mom remembered how Jesus thanked God before he raised Lazarus from the tomb:

“Father, I thank thee that thou hast heard me.”

 

     She realized that - if she truly believed in the power of prayer - she shouldn’t wait to give gratitude until after she received what she was praying for. She needed to be grateful first to prove her faith. So, right then and there – without any change in the present desperate circumstances - she gave thanks to God. It was like an impromptu Thanksgiving in the dead of a dark winter’s night. She knew at that moment that everything was going to be okay.

     “Within just a few minutes,” my Mom recalled years later, “a pair of headlights appeared down Highway 25. As the car drew near the motel, the blinker came on. As they pulled into the drive, another car appeared, then another and another. In less than fifteen minutes there was a line of people waiting at the counter to check-in. The rooms were filled that night, and, in all the years we owned that motel, we never faced that problem again.”

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” James 1:17.

Dear Sarah Jessica Parker:

There is zero point zero percent chance you remember this, but once upon a time in a land far away we spent a couple of days together. And you were awesome.

Summer, 1988. Jacksonville, Florida. I was working as a promotions producer (called ourselves promosexuals) at Channel 17, the local NBC affiliate. My job was to try and coerce our handful of viewers (we were number three in a tiny market) to watch our tired reruns of The A-team, Good Times and Magnum, PI. It was a thanklessly unglamorous job that paid peanuts and only sounded impressive to those who thought anything that had to do with TV was “really cool.”

One day, our Promotions Director called me into his office to inform me that my job description had been expanded to “celebrity liaison.”

“Ever hear of an actress named “Sarah Jane Parker?” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “I need you to schlep her around for a few days. Can you handle that?”

“Sure,” I said.

I did my research and found out that Sarah Jane Parker was, in actuality, Sarah Jessica Parker.  She was starring on a little known NBC Show called “A Year in the Life.” The show was a critical darling, so the network was doing anything it could to pump up the ratings. They were sending one of their promising young starlets out on the road do a little local promotion. We were just one of a dozen plus stops on her promotional tour. My job was to pick her up at the airport and shuttle her around for a couple or days. I was bored, so it was a welcome diversion.

I watched an episode of her show to make sure I knew who she was and thought she was pretty cute with her otherworldly 1980s hair.

As I drove to the airport to meet her plane, I steeled myself. I’d heard horror stories of prima donna diva TV stars and imagined her arriving with a cadre of handlers. She was going to blow her stack when she discovered that I’d come driving a crappy Honda Civic no bigger than a shoebox.    

I was a little taken aback when Sarah Jessica Parker walked off the plane alone and smiling. She came right over to me. “You’re Rob?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.  She was a bit more petite than I’d imagined, had arguably the bluest eyes I’d ever seen, and the hair was even more impressive in person. Her smile was no faux I-know-people-are-watching-so-I’m-trying-to-seem-like-a-nice-person smile. It was genuine. I knew first impressions could be deceptive, but this three-named chick seemed sincere.

“Hi Sarah,” I croaked like Peter Brady on the episode where his voice is changing. “Welcome to Jacksonville.”

I asked if there were others, and she assured me she was all alone. Wow, no entourage. What kind of TV star was this?

I apologized for my car. I assumed that all celebrities drove around in stretch limos all day, and I wanted her to know that this would not be happening while she was with me. She put me at ease, told me that her car was also a compact. Sure, I thought. Sure, it is.

I made idle chitchat as we hummed down I-95 towards her hotel. I was nervous enough around ordinary members of the opposite sex, but this was a celebrity and a dad gum attractive one at that. I couldn’t even believe we were breathing the same air much less sharing the same cramped little stick shift.

As we rolled by the lights of downtown, I gave my star passenger a quick rundown on the lovely the city of Jax. I pointed out the Jacksonville Landing in the distance, told her that was where all the cool shops and restaurants were located.

“Wanna go hang out?” she said.

I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. “Excuse me?” I said.

“Would you like to hang out for awhile?”

“Uh, sure,” I said. “Fine. Let’s go hang out.”

I took her to a quiet little seafood joint on the St. Johns River. It was just starting to rain, and Sarah Jessica suggested it would be fun to eat outside under an umbrella.

“Reminds me of Paris,” she said as we settled into our table-for-two. “Okay,” she said. “Ask me a question. Anything you want to know.”

I hadn’t exactly prepared myself for an interview, so the best I could blabber was “Do you know Rob Lowe?”

She smiled and said that he was one of her best friends and a good guy. “Next.” I followed up with the similarly scintillating query, “Do you know Michael J. Fox?” She told me how they’d recently gone out on a date, and the paparazzi had followed her into the bathroom.

By the time the check arrived, I’d worked myself through the entire Brat Pack, and she’d fielded my fan boy questions with patient enthusiasm. I found out that she’d been Annie on Broadway and had been in a movie with Kevin Bacon called Footloose.

It was after midnight when I finally dropped her off at her hotel. I told her I’d see her first thing in the morning.

For the next couple of days, Sarah Jessica Parker and I were pretty much inseparable. I drove her to radio and newspaper interviews and promo shoots. I’d let her use my office phone to call boyfriend Robert Downey Jr. who was shooting a movie called “1969” with another of her best buddies, Keifer Sutherland, just up the road in Savannah.

In between our official business, we’d go to the mall or to eat or to just hang out and talk. There was something about her that struck me as unusual – or least something I hadn’t experienced all that often. She was just…nice. This pretty TV star was unselfish and thoughtful. Whenever she ran into a store to pick up something for herself, she’d always bring me back something, too. A candy bar. A Slurpee. Cracker Jacks. Whenever somebody approached her to say hello or ask for an autograph, she was genuinely friendly and approachable. Sarah Jessica Parker seemed to be head over heels in love with life – and the wacky people that populated hers.

And SJP seemed to intuitively know the exact thing to say to make someone feel ten feet tall.

There was a particularly shy and awkward young man at the station and, when I introduced Sarah to him, she seemed to intuitively sense it. “Sarah. This is Joe. People say he looks a little like Keifer Sutherland.”

“Oh, he’s MUCH better looking than Keifer,” Sarah said. Joe blushed bright pink, and I wondered if she knew that she’d made his life.

By the time I drove my celebrity guest back to the airport to drop her off for her flight home to LA, she had stopped being a TV star. She was just Sarah – a cool girl who I really liked hanging out with. I felt comfortable enough with her to ask her advice.

“Sarah, I’m thinking of quitting my job and moving to LA. I think I want to be a screenwriter.”

“Do it,” she said. “If you don’t, you’ll regret it. Never be afraid to be bold.”

As I dropped her off at the gate and said goodbye, she gave me a hug. “Look me up when you come to LA. I’ll fix you up with someone.”

I smiled and said I would.  She turned back and blew me a kiss just before disappearing down the boarding ramp.

As I drove back to the TV station and my ordinary celebrity-free life, I thought about what Sarah Jessica Parker had said about boldness. Six weeks later, I rolled out of town with my little compact crammed to the gills with my meager possessions. I was headed west.

I made it to Hollywood four days later with Sarah Jessica Parker’s phone number in my shirt pocket. I never called her. Maybe I didn’t want to bother her, maybe I wanted to make something of myself first. Before long, her promising career took off full flight. SJP became a household name, an American icon. I watched from a distance and wondered if her legion of fans really knew what an amazing person she truly was. I decided to take her advice and be bold. I wrote a movie script. It made the rounds for a few years and then…one day – the phone rang.

When it finally got made, I found it ironic that my first movie starred Kristin Davis – one of SJP’s Sex and the City co-stars.