Ta daah!

Significant progress was made on the roof over the weekend.

I couldn’t have done it without the help of

Greyfox… who took all the pictures…

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Koji, for comic relief…

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…and Doug, who kept the tarp from blowing away.

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This is how it looked when we started on Saturday…

(That’s our shiny new Metalbestos® chimney.  Isn’t it neat… a cap and everything, just like downtown?)

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I was almost done nailing down the front edge of the last tarp when a brilliant thought hit me:  I could have weighted down the loose end and let Doug nail across to me!

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As I mentioned in an earlier blog, some adjustments had to be made to fit the tarp around the antenna mast.  At least the pole gave me something to tie the tarp to… saved a nail, anyway.

The work got done during a rare interval without rain and even the wind cooperated, a little bit, grudgingly, with only a few gusts that threatened to take us away with the tarp before Greyfox got out there with the camera.  When it was all done, the building inspector gave it a sniff of approval.

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Our woodpile has grown too large for its tarp. 

Three things no Alaskan can live without:

Tarps. Visqueen (poly sheeting) and “duck tape” (duct, to the sticklers).

We haven’t yet taped the Visqueen over the windows for winter.  It’s really not that cold, yet.  The roof still needs to be tied down and sealed at a couple of seams, but the tricky stuff is done and it sheds water.  Greyfox’s bed hasn’t gotten dripped on for a month or so, since that phase was completed.

Yesterday’s weather map showed precipitation over the entire BIG state.  There are definitely more leaves on the ground than on the trees, and tourist season is over.  Today is the last day some of the lodges and seasonal businesses will be open this year.  If we get any more days when the temp is above 30° F and the chance of precip is below 30%, Greyfox will be back at the stand in Talkeetna selling knives, rocks, books and videos to the locals.  Who knows, there might even be a few hardy tourists here in search of the aurora borealis.

Roof Progress Report

I have progress to report.  There was a lessening of the wind and the clouds thinned a bit on Saturday.  Now it is Sunday, and Xanga won’t let me upload images.  This story needs pictures. 

I’ll show you phase 5 of the roofing foofaraw when I can.  Meanwhile, this story in today’s paper is for my readers who enjoy little glimpses of Alaskan local color.

Anchorage Daily News | Mushers face killing dogs

(part five, if you count the “Welcome to New Mexico, white man,” story)

Our first night in Silver City, early in January, 1991, it
snowed.  There was about an inch and a half of soft, warm snow on
the ground when we came out of the motel. [Yes, snow can be
"warm".  When it is cold, it crunches; even colder, it
squeaks underfoot, but warm snow just goes squish.]  As we drove
across town, Greyfox in the 4-wheel drive Jimmy and I driving little
Gina, the X1/9, we were the only cars on the streets.  As we ate
breakfast and listened to people marveling over the snow, it melted
and the somewhat delayed morning rush hour traffic appeared.

With my years of living in Alaska, and Greyfox’s having lived his
whole life where snow was an annual reality, we found many occasions
that winter for amusement at the different ways people perceive
cold.  We’d both be in t-shirts when the locals were in parkas,
and that’s no exaggeration.  By the time we left in spring, it was
too hot there for my comfort.

We made many short trips around the area and visited parks and
museums.  We found Rockhound State Park nearby in Deming, where
they allow visitors to take home rocks.  The locality has some
beautiful agates.  Near the entrance to the park, we found the
Geolapidary Museum, run by a couple of men to whom we both felt
immediate affinity and affection.  We went back several times,
learning the geology of the area and fine-tuning our
mineral-identification skills.  Other mineral museums we visited
on the trip, from Rapid City, SD, to Soccorro, NM, helped us learn to
distinguish one mineral from another.

Deming’s big annual gem and mineral show, the Rockhound Roundup,
presented such a tempting array of rocks that we both began to feel as
if, just maybe, we were collecting too many rocks.  At one booth,
when Greyfox expressed that sentiment, the old lady running the booth
said, “You can’t have too many rocks.  If you ever get more than
you can haul, you can always park by the side of the road and sell
some.”  It seems a prophetic remark, in the light of subsequent
events.  Greyfox’s Last Stand started out selling rocks, some
jewelry I had made from rocks, and some herb plants I grew.  When
Greyfox noticed that most of the people who stopped were women, he
added knives to his inventory to attract male customers.  But that
wouldn’t start for three years yet.

In Silver City, we made a bunch of new friends.  The first one,
we found at Bear Creek Herbs (left).  Michael is a toad-licking
shaman who traveled to Mexico twice a year to collect herbs and
psychedelic toads.  His mentor as an herbalist was Mexican, and
from Michael I learned about plants I’d never heard of before.

Michael steered us toward the local food co-op, where members all
spent time as volunteers minding the store, which brought us into
contact with people whose interests intersected ours.  After
Greyfox started the nude modeling and teaching the intro to shamanism
courses (that’s him at right outside Light Hall at WNMU where he
taught) we met more, and the business cards we stuck on bulletin
boards all over town started bringing calls and even more interesting
people.  We encountered some confusion because we called our
business “Soulmates Unlimited” and some thought it was a dating service.

One card I put up in the laundromat in Bayard caught the eye of a
woman who taught school there and published a little weekly newspaper
devoted largely to environmental and “alternative” news.  She
wanted to interview us, and we ended up having her over to our place
once, visiting her place a few times, and coming to school to show her
second grade class our rock collection.  When she printed our
interview, it took up about three pages of the paper and dealt in depth
with how we met and some of our shared past life experiences. 
“The Psychic and the Shaman” brought more interest in Greyfox’s classes
and our work. 

When
we started looking for a place to live, it became apparent that Silver
City, being a college town, didn’t have much to offer in low-rent
vacancies.  The places we looked at were either too expensive or
too squalid for us.  We settled in Bayard, a few miles away, in a
trailer at a small 6-unit court beside the landlord’s house.  The
view out our windows, past the neighbors’ trailers, was a fantastic
vista of hogbacks that lit up in glorious colors with the rising and
setting sun.  Just across an arroyo, another neighbor had peacocks
and so our honeymoon was spent to the accompaniment of their cries for
“help”.

Michael, the herbalist, mentioned to me that the desert was in bloom
around Saguaro National Monument, and since Greyfox was tied down at
the University teaching and posing for art students, I took off on a
week-long excursion alone in Gina, to see and photograph
wildflowers.  A bit later, between terms when Greyfox had free
time, we did some excursions together.  Those were fun times, and
we had a lot of fun in our little honeymoon trailer, too.  I
wanted an apron and couldn’t find any for sale locally, so I made
one.  As I sewed, he read aloud to me and it was pleasant for
both of us.  

We played cards (Samba) at our kitchen table overlooking the trailer
court.  We noticed unusually heavy traffic at one neighbor’s
place, usually at night.  We paid closer attention and soon
saw what appeared to be money and merchandise changing
hands.  A few times we saw people in the cars or on the
porch, passing smokes around.  Our conclusion was that there was
some drug dealing going on, and that it probably involved the sacred
herb that we were both missing.  Greyfox finally asked the
neighbor one day when he saw him out in the yard, if he knew where we
could get any weed.  He said he didn’t, and I guess we scared
him, because there was less of that traffic after that.  The only
weed we had the entire time was a little film can sent to us from
Alaska by my ex.

Honeymoons are generally supposed to be times of sexual indulgence,
and ours was all of that.  “Pleasure breaks” could happen just
about any time unless Greyfox was depressed or upset.  He was
having a lot of mood swings that mystified me until he revealed that he
had run out of  Xanax and was having a hard time with the
withdrawal.  I saw that as yet another betrayal, because he had
told me in Harrisburg that he was tossing out the rest of his
Xanax.  He, even now, attributes his decision to take early
retirement and move to Alaska to impaired judgement from Xanax. 
He doesn’t recall how long he was on it, somewhere between one and
three years.  He didn’t know, until I showed him the PDR, that the
stuff was only to be prescribed for short-term management of acute
anxiety.

Then there was the alcohol binge.  Alcohol deserves some
comment here because it has been a focus of most of the trouble in our
relationship.  One reason Greyfox wanted to come to Alaska was for
healing, to “fight” his addictions.  For many years, he and I have
carried on a discussion of “fighting” versus “transcending”
addictions.  I say that “what you resist persists” and that one
must, to succeed, let the addiction go.  He is programmed
differently and it has only been very recently that the little light
bulb went on for him and he grasped that concept of
transcendence.  I think he now has a chance.

[edit, November 10, 2005: 
I must have written this during one of Greyfox's occasional dry periods
of remorse following a big sickmaking binge.  He did work at
staying sober from time to time, and from time to time he even
convinced me that he was going to make his abstinence permanent. 
It was not until May 23, 2003,
that he started taking orthomolecular amino acid supplements,
transcended his old 12-step one-day-at-a-time programming and made a
lifetime commitment to staying clean and sober.  He has kept that
commitment for two and a half years now, longer than I had seen him
stay sober, and goes to NA meetings mostly to play the heretic and tell
them that, "One day at a time is a back door through which it is easy
to relapse."]

But back then, on our honeymoon, he was still playing games. 
He said he needed to go on a shamanic retreat, that he felt impelled to
climb the mountain at Rockhound State Park and do a vision quest. 
He left me in Bayard and went.  What he ended up doing was parking
the Jimmy in the lot at the Geolapidary Museum and drinking about
three liters of hard stuff over the course of a couple of days. 
That was during the filming of the movie, Gas Food Lodging there at the
museum.  It was, of course, what he planned all along.  When
he came back later than planned, sick, hungover and professing remorse,
I was pissed off.  All indications suggest that he had been
accustomed to getting sympathy when he made himself sick. 
Surprise, Vodka-breath!  No sympathy here.  Suffer, Asshole.

I almost took off alone in Gina, headed north.  He cried and
pleaded.  He promised it would never happen again.  He gave
me a reassuring line of bullshit I’ve heard, in practically the same
words every time, a dozen or more times since then.  I recognized
it as “the addict talking”, something I know a lot about from street
experience and professional training.  We talked about AA and
other addiction strategies.  His alcoholism was never a secret,
and his lip-service has always maintained that he wanted to quit
drinking, while behaviorally he showed he was in denial about his
addiction. 

He is a classic binge drinker and his drunken behavior usually
involves bizarre public displays.  I took a picture once, in our
driveway at home, of him naked and dancing on the roof of our
car.  The pictures I’ve taken and some recordings I made of his
mooing sounds when he was in a blackout, have been effective tools for
showing him some advantages to sobriety, but not nearly as effective as
the time he was jailed when, in my absence as I worked a summer music
festival, a neighbor noticed him in the yard, naked, waving a gun
around and raving semi-coherently about killing himself. 

Greyfox’s latest binge was about two weeks ago.  Several months
before that I had gotten fed up with his sneaking drinks in the
evenings at home and told him if he wanted to drink he’d have to do it
elsewhere.  He has a little travel trailer parked on my lot across
the highway, and for months he would occasionally say he was
“going to spend the night across the road.”  He has a hard time
talking about drinking, but we’re working on that as he begins to
see the addiction not in terms of “character defect” but in terms
of neurotransmitter imbalance.  For the first few months of the
“over there” plan, he would be back in the morning.  That last
time, however, he didn’t come back when he said he would.

Midday, I went over and checked, determined he was still alive and
drunk, and left him there.  That night he showed up on the
doorstep and I said he had to leave because he was still
intoxicated.  Then, as I watched him stagger back out the
driveway and slam into a tree that was nowhere near his intended route,
I stopped him.  He was soaked with cold rain, and barely
articulate.  Shivering, all he could say was, “cold”.  I let
him in and led him to his bed.

Later, we had our old familiar confrontation about the drinking and
about the divorce.  The gist of it is that I won’t be his enabler
and I don’t want to accept the risks he presents with his
drinking.  One of those risks is my own anger.  On one of his
binges, a four-day marathon that occurred at a time when he had several
commitments and I had to deal with the people who came around looking
for him, I came very close to killing him.  I had had to wrestle a
loaded pistol away from him when he threatened to shoot me.  Then
he passed out and I searched his trailer and removed all the
firearms.  (Rules on his “over there” drinking would include
no firearms and no motor vehicles.) The search had turned up a
partial bottle and a full liter of alcohol.  I poured them all
over his inert form and stood there with the lighter in my hand,
contemplating the delicious thought of fox flambé.

Anyhow, that latest cold, wet binge of his, just possibly,
could really be his last.  [Obviously, it wasn't, quite.]  He
has changed his tune and begins to see some of the fallacies in his
belief system that have perpetuated the addiction.  He’s working
on his neurotransmitters and willingly talking about his
cravings.  A couple of days after that binge we went on our little
getaway for my birthday and had the sort of honeymoon I would have
loved the first time around.  But that first time the honeymoon
wasn’t so great.

There
were good times, definitely.  But being with a dysphoric addict in
withdrawal isn’t a whole lot more fun than being one. 

We packed up (note the stuff piled on and around our cars) and left
our little honeymoon trailer in Bayard.  On the way out of town,
we stopped back at the elementary school again, at the invitation of
the second graders who had loved our rock show and tell.  Each of
them had a gift for us, and we had to find room for another box of
rocks.  One of those rocks I tried to refuse, but the teacher
assured me the child and his parents wished us to have it.  It was
an ancient core stone of agatized wood, from which some knapper had
knocked flakes for tools.  It is still the centerpiece of my
collection.  I’m a fool for old artifacts.  They have such
interesting stories to tell.

Neither
of us had ever been to Yellowstone.  Our route north took us up
through Four Corners again, with stops in Canyonlands, Arches and
Dinosaur National Monument among others. 

We stayed a few days in the Inn at Old Faithful, a place I was
reminded of when we stayed recently at the Talkeetna Alaskan
Lodge.  Our trip was timed to get us to Bellingham, Washington in
time to keep our reservations on the Alaska Marine Highway ferry. 
The trip up the Inside Passage was beautiful.

For me, getting home was wonderful.  I had Doug on my lap
before I could get out of Gina.  I threw myself into gardening and
Greyfox started building a sweat lodge.  He was still dysphoric
and bitter, completely out of his element in a place where his public
relations skills (he had been a professional liar) had no
value and where he would be called upon to slime salmon and swing a
hammer and axe for the first time in his life.  Still, there were
good times.  The best thing about our little family (and all three
of us acknowledge this) is the laughter.  If we didn’t all have
well-developed senses of humor, this could have turned into a
tragedy.  But in our house, comedy is king.

Edited, revised, expanded and updated on Thursday, November 10, 2005, in response to a Featured_Grownups challenge.

Where was I…?  Oh, yes, Greyfox and I were on our
honeymoon.  Only, in a very real sense, the honeymoon was
over.  I was feeling frustrated at never knowing from moment to
moment what nasty surprise he might have in store for me, and I was
growing increasingly angry at being jerked around.  I’ve had years
to get used to his behavior patterns now, and it has been an important
facet in my personal growth.  I no longer react so negatively when
promises are broken or my expectations are disappointed.  I’ve
been learning how to live in the NOW without
expectations.  That is how I feel now.  At the time, we
were both unhappy with each other and our choices.

I had suspected even before I consented to marry him that it was a
mistake.  I did it for love, for love of him because he said he
wanted it so much.  Then, driving back to Harrisburg from Virginia
the day after the wedding, he said he wished he hadn’t married
me.  I don’t know, didn’t know at the time, what changed his mind
and he wouldn’t tell me.  Then, when he went to renew his car
insurance in New Mexico, he learned that it would cost him about a
hundred dollars more because of my not having had insurance a few years
previously, when a drunk driver made an illegal left turn and wrecked
my car (wracked me up pretty badly, too–having my license suspended
for being uninsured was insult added to injury).  That extra
expense prompted him to tell me, “Marrying you was the worst mistake
I’ve ever made.”  That led to my first request for the promised
divorce.  I haven’t counted how many times I’ve asked since then.

We did get mad at each other, often.  But we didn’t stay
mad.  I simply don’t stay mad.  By then I had learned that I
had a choice whether to hold a grudge or let it go and lighten my
burden, and in most instances I chose to let things pass without
ruining my day.  It was much easier to maintain that attitude
before I had Greyfox piling on the verbal abuse and betrayal all the
time.  His dysfunctional psycho-social programming has been
instrumental in strengthening my wa, my social harmony and
inner peace.  Just like muscles and courage, inner peace grows
stronger with exercise.  [edit, 11/10/05:  "...dysfunctional
psycho-social programming..."  That's how I saw it and spoke of it
at the time I'm writing about, and when I was writing this entry. 
It was not until the summer of 2003, after Greyfox stopped using
alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and various other drugs, all on the same
day (May 23 -- 5/23/2003) and then took an online personality test and
diagnosed his own NPD:  narcissistic personality disorder, that I
had a convenient label for his psychopathology and a better
understanding of where it came from and all the ways he manifests
it.  He's getting better now; really he is.]

Greyfox’s ideas about love changed through his association with
me.  Before he knew me, he didn’t think you could get “mad at”
(angry with) someone you love.  In his previous paradigm, if you
got angry, you stopped loving.  I managed to convince him on our
honeymoon that I was indeed extremely angry at him, and I also loved
him.   Many times, from the honeymoon onward, he has looked
at me lovingly, shaken his head and said in wonder, “I can’t stay
mad at you.”  If that’s because of a talent I have, I’m really
glad I have it.

He had also believed that loving someone meant that you needed
to stay with him/her.  I knew, just by reflecting on all the
people I love with whom I have no perceived need for constant contact,
that this was not true for me.  I think he believed me when I said
I loved him but I really didn’t want to stay with him because he kept
lying and breaking promises and jerking me around.  But he kept
insisting that he had burned his bridges, had no place to go but here
with me.

When I would remind him of his own statements of regret at marrying
me and wishing he’d never met me, etc., he would say he didn’t mean it,
he was just upset.  I urged him to say what he meant, and only
what he meant.  He thought that was a novel concept, and he
laughed at me.  For both of us, there were things binding us
together while other things drove us apart.  We are still
together, so it’s sort of obvious which urge has prevailed thus far.

From Canyon de Chelly, it was a long drive to Silver City, the
closest big dot on the map to the Mimbres Valley.  I was headed
for the Mimbres, but since it wasn’t a town, it didn’t constitute a
valid destination for Greyfox.  I mention this to illustrate some
of the differences in our views of the world.  For me, the world
is a big place full of smaller  places, but for him if
it’s not a city or a park or a point on the map, it’s not a real
place.  A river or a valley is just too diffuse a concept for
him.  For me, traveling means taking the scenic route and stopping
when I see something interesting.  For him, before coming here
where there are no big highways, a cross-country trip meant entering an
Interstate highway as if it were a tunnel, and getting out at the
ultimate destination.

A lot of that trip to Silver City was on Highway 666 and I was
reminded of many times my mother and I had crossed Arizona and New
Mexico on Route 66.  I have always loved the US Southwest. 
On our honeymoon, I began to understand why I’ve had that lifelong
affinity for the area.  At Gila Cliff Dwellings, I had a vision of
watching a straggling bunch of refugees climb the canyon toward the
hidden gully where they later built their pueblo.  At several
places along the Mimbres River, the skyline: the hogbacks and mesas of
that basin and range country, was eerily familiar though I had never in
this lifetime been anywhere near there before.

Greyfox was spending a lot of time in shamanic trance and came back
on several occasions with stories about our past lives in the 4 Corners
area.  We both gravitated toward the ceramics displays in the
archaeological museums.  When he came out of trance one day with a
story about a time in which we had been creative partners, we started
trying to track that experience down, locate our village and set a time
period on it.   At first it seemed a fruitless quest. 
His shamanic journey had revealed a time of raiding and warfare, of
defensive settlement patterns at odds with what the archaeological
mainstream believed.  Eventually, we found published sources that
disagreed with the mainstream’s view of the prehistoric pueblo culture
as peaceful, and supported our memories of the lives we spent in that
culture with warfare and extreme violence.

I got goose bumps every time we drove the winding road up from
Silver City through Piños Altos to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. 
Until our first ride up there together, I had never been to the little
town of Piños
Altos, but I knew the place.  It was like going through my old
hometown and seeing how it had changed over the years I was gone.

By him driving around with me riding shotgun in trance, we’d get a
direction, but there were often not roads going that way.  We
found a few back roads, and we made friends with people who could tell
us where some lesser-known ruins were located.  In a sheltered
location high on a slope facing the Mimbres River, we found a ruin we
both recognized, called the Swartz Ruin because it was found on the
Swartz Ranch.  In that place, around eight centuries ago (we have
yet to positively date it) he was called something that meant,
“Coiler”.  He built the pots of clay and I, “Storm” (so named
because I’d been born during a thunderstorm), painted the sacred
designs on the pots he made.  Our people were destroyed, our
village depopulated by traders from the south who sold us grain in a
time of drought and hunger.  The grain was poisoned, and from
Coiler’s description of the way the people went mad from it, it sounds
a lot like ergot.  I, Storm, clawed my own eyes out.  Coiler
had been out of the village and didn’t eat any of the bad grain. 
When  he came back and found us all dead or mad and dying, he
tracked the trading party down and out across the desert toward Casas
Grandes.  His last memory was approaching the traders at a run and
being struck down from behind as he overtook them and tried to tell
them of what had happened in our pueblo.

Later on, in the Doña Ana museum, I recognized a bowl as my own work
(as Storm’s design).  I stood transfixed in the display of pottery
and couldn’t explain to Greyfox, at first couldn’t speak at all. 
At the time, all that past life stuff was new enough to me that the
daily revelations were blowing me away. 

There was one geographical area that exerted a strong pull on both
of us.  Each time we passed a certain highway exit between Bayard
and the long stretch of flat desert where the Mimbres runs underground
before reaching the subterranean “tanks” at Deming, we both turned our
heads north toward the mountains.  Each time we drove up that road
and past the “Kneeling Nun” rock formation, we would feel we were
getting near someplace important, but we never found it.  What we
found was the Santa Rita Pit, where a strip mine destroyed the old
Spanish village of Santa Rita that had grown up around ancient copper
mines dug by the natives.

There’s more .  It was a long honeymoon.

Edited, expanded, revised, updated and improved on Thursday, November 10, 2005, in preparation for a Featured_Grownups challenge.  The lead-in to this entry is here.

Somehow, I’ve given Kabuki
the impression that I really do want to tell this honeymoon
story.  *sigh*  This one is much harder for me to tell than
any of the “ancient history” I’ve dealt with thus far in my memoir
blogs.  I could distance myself from those stories because I had
put that stuff behind me.  The story of my relationship with
Greyfox is NOW.  Our issues are still current, unresolved and very
personal.  [That was in 2002.  He got clean and sober and
diagnosed his own NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) in 2003,
which resolved most of those issues.]  After yesterday’s blog, I
knew I’d whacked a hornet’s nest and would have to deal with it. 
I knew, first off, that I had to go back and clarify some things I’d
glossed over in yesterday’s blog.  I can only hope this will end
up being therapeutic, because it is in no way fun or easy.

TheHorseYouRode questioned
me on the “little Libran mind” statement, so I’ll start there. 
Librans in general (and one must always beware of generalizations where
humans are concerned) are much like their fellow-airheads, the
Geminis.  It is hard to tell whether they change their minds a
lot, or if they just never make them up at all.  There’s a lot of
air in my chart, too.  Many things in life, to me, are one way
or another, and I usually don’t waste a lot of time trying to
decide which way they are.  When pressed for a decision, Greyfox
will say something to take the pressure off, but he is unlikely to
recall later what it was he said in such a situation.

The “little” part of that “little Libran mind” crack is a
family in-joke.  He started referring to himself, his mind, his
clothes, etc., as “little” in our correspondence before we met.  I
think he wanted to be sure I wouldn’t be disappointed when we met, or
else he was just being cute.  Who knows?  Anyway, “little” is
a word I often apply to Greyfox… but he started it.  His mind
is immense and unfathomable.  Like me, he is a former member
of Mensa and Intertel.  With Sun and Moon both in Libra, his
mental and emotional scales swing wildly back and forth.  The
more important the decision, the less likely he is to be able to make
one and stick with it.  My remark referred only to him, not to all
Librans, although decisiveness is not commonly attributed to air signs
in general.

The first bit I glossed over yesterday was the past
lives.  That would be particularly egregious in this case, since
that was what drew the two of us together.  The same night as that
reading (his second from me) in which I wrote, “I love you,” I did a
hypnotic regression to find out where I’d known him before.  The
first association revealed was the oldest.  He was my sensei and I
was his deshi and we were wandering warrior monks in Asia a few
millennia ago.

That time, he died bitter and unfulfilled because all his
followers except for me had deserted him and I wasn’t enough of a
follower to please him.  I took what he taught me and modified and
expanded on it.  He was afraid that changing the teachings would
destroy them.  After his death I went on developing and
teaching.  His dying doubts and my lifelong desire to prove myself
to him were the impetus for our entire series of joint
incarnations.  It strikes me that this was a particularly
male/male karmic hook, but we added a lot of different hooks in
time.  The series of shared lives that followed served to create a
more and more complex Karmic bond between us.  His fears regarding
my handling of his teachings, by the way, were baseless.  Aikido
and some other martial arts disciplines carry on those
traditions.  The tradition of letting the teachings develop and
change has kept them alive.

We have been to each other almost every relationship people can
have.  We’ve been each other’s parents and children, siblings,
friends and enemies.  When we were together in the Roman Legions,
he saved my life.  When we were together in Elizabethan England, I
saved his life.  In late Mediaeval Scotland, he abandoned me and
our five children and in despair I killed myself and the kids. 
When he came back and found out we were dead, he killed himself by
falling on his sword.  Greyfox says that no one who hasn’t done it
can possibly understand how hard it is to fall on one’s own sword.

When we first got here after our honeymoon, I wanted to start
writing a book together, based on our reincarnational history.  My
readings had told me that was the way we could make our fortune
together.  I would not even have thought to ask the oracles how we
might make our fortune, but that was Greyfox’s concern.  He had
done some readings himself, and had asked his friend Silver RavenWolf
for a reading on our prospects for wealth together.  Money has
always been a lot more important in this life to him than to me. 
Silver’s reading and all of his readings indicated potential
wealth.  He never thought to ask “how,” and he apparently ignored
other cautions contained in those readings, about the need for wisdom,
discipline, patience, and transcending our addictions.

Unfortunately for him, when he got here he was far too involved in
his fear of not having a regular income and comfortable home to
concentrate on writing the book that our readings said could make us
rich.  He chose instead to put his energy into blaming me for
his insecurity and the money he “lost” by taking early retirement to
join me here.  If I ever needed an object lesson in the futility
and counterproductivity of letting one’s fears run one’s life, he
provided it.  I didn’t really need it.  I didn’t need another
difficult child, either; particularly not one with poly-addictions and
a lifelong habit of lying.  The lesson he chose to find in the
experience was that soulmates are bad news.  But I’m getting ahead
of myself, aren’t I?

The other matter I glossed over yesterday was our marriage.  I
didn’t want to marry him.  I only wanted to be with him. 
From that moment during the reading when I realized I loved this
stranger, I wanted to meet him.  He said it was the same for
him.  He has told many people that the first time he heard my
voice on the phone, he said to himself, “I’m going to marry her.” 
I felt I’d had more than enough of marriage in my life.  It is a
meaningless formality for me, just paper and legal
entanglements, certainly no guarantee of the permanence, fidelity
or security it is supposed to represent.

I told him all of that.  He countered it by saying that his
“upper middle-class values” wouldn’t let him be comfortable living
under the same roof, having sex (and especially with my young son
there, too), without marriage.  He was lying.  For starters,
any “upper” middle-class values he might have had at the time were
recent acquisitions, since there is nothing “upper” in his family
background.  He was just trying to come up with a good rationale
that would convince me.  He was wise enough to realize that his
fascination with my psychic ability and his greed for the wealth he was
convinced we’d have together wouldn’t motivate me to marry him.

I hated being in Pennsylvania.  I wanted to be with him, but I
wanted to be home, where the air and water are clean and there is some
space between neighbors.  He had already tendered his resignation,
taken early retirement from his job before Doug and I arrived
there.  It was a fait accompli and we were just there to help him
pack up and move, he said.  He lied about that, too.  He
thought if he got me there he could persuade me to stay.  The
longer we were there, the worse I wanted to leave.  Each time we
visited his mother, we headed west on an expressway for a few
miles.  Each time, I hated taking the exit.  I wanted to just
keep going into the sunset.

Greyfox had lived his whole life there.  He was scared to
leave.  I didn’t want him to do anything he didn’t want to do, but
I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself and my son to his fears.  He
went from trying to get me to stay there, to trying to get me to marry
him and return alone to Alaska and wait for him.  I told him
I’d return to Alaska, but wouldn’t sit on a shelf waiting for
him.  If he ever made it back up here we would see how things went
from there.

That is how things stood when his Fiat was wrecked, and I asked him
to give me the wrecked car instead of buying plane tickets for me and
Doug.  He jumped at that since the insurance company considered it
totaled and paid off on it because of the frame damage.  He’d
save hundreds of dollars, and the car was driveable, especially
after one fender was bent out so it didn’t scrape the tire except when
I went over bumps.  Until now, whenever the subject of the Fiat
came up, I’d referred to her as Greyfox’s “wedding present” to
me.  Explaining it to strangers or casual acquaintances was just
too complicated, painful and personal.

But before I could get camping gear together and get out of
Harrisburg, he had changed his mind again.  He talked me into
marrying him by promising that it would never be a burdensome
entanglement to me.  He said if I wanted out, all I had to do was
say so and he would handle all the expense and paperwork of a
divorce.  He lied, of course.  I would be very upset with
myself, my supposedly psychic self, for not seeing through his lies, if
I had not heard Sylvia Browne say that it has been that way in her
life, too:  we know about the details of other people’s lives, but
in our own life the talent doesn’t usually work.  I suppose
it would be an unfair advantage otherwise, eh?

Apparently, Greyfox’s fear of losing me was stronger than his fear
of leaving home.  Or that “million dollars” his readings told him
we could earn together was a powerful lure.  Whatever impelled
him, he kept his rendezvous at Custer State Park and proceeded to
follow me south through the Rockies.  I loved the drive.  He
hated it.  I had not yet realized that he lied more than he told
the truth, and he had not yet realized that I don’t lie.  So
neither of us was operating on accurate information.  I thought he
was telling me the truth when he was just saying what he thought I
wanted to hear.  He thought I was making things up, kidding,
exaggerating or being manipulative (because that was how he operated)
when I was being honest.

In this shot taken at Spruce Tree House in Mesa Verde, Greyfox is
second from left.  The small figure in the distance at right is
Doug, making his usual stealthy escape, away from the ranger-guided
tour and toward the ladder leading down into a small kin-kiva.

While we were at Mesa Verde, Greyfox had vivid recall of a life he
spent there hundreds of years ago.  He had starved himself to
death, fasting for a vision to help his people deal with the crisis of
changing climate and hostile neighbors.  As we left there it
started snowing, and that was when the skunk was moseying along the
white line of the road, looking over its shoulder at him.  We had
a lot of conversations about the Trickster, Heyoka, Coyote, and
such.  Greyfox was frightened of the whole idea, while Doug and I
found a lot of humor in it, and in his reactions.  [2005
update:  Greyfox took a lot of narcissistic injury from our
laughter at his expense, and as those with NPD usually do, he plotted
and exacted revenge for every perceived slight.]  Coyote is one of
my shamanic power animals, and I know that if you don’t invite
Trickster to the party, he will show up anyway and will be pissed off
to boot.

Chaco Canyon was intense for all of us, too.  (In this shot, Doug can
be seen reading the guidebook in the window at upper right in the Great Kiva
at Casa Rinconada.)  I kept seeing familiar vistas in the desert
skyline, and Greyfox had a detailed regression to a life when he had
been a young woman chosen for a symbolic role in fertility rites, whose later
death in childbirth represented a dire omen to her people.

This shot of Doug and Greyfox trying to both be at the precise apex of
the Four Corners at the same time records one of the few happy,
pleasant, friendly moments they shared on that trip, even as it
illustrates their continual rivalry.  My husband, who said he
loved my son, actually hated him.  My kid, the Leo born in the
year of the Cock, has always been so wrapped up in himself that he
isn’t particularly worried about what others think of him, but he was
traumatized by Greyfox’s unjust accusations, sarcastic sniping and his
temporarily somewhat successful efforts to drive a wedge between Doug
and me.

Then we put Doug on the plane home and discovered once again that
Greyfox and I were not on the same page.  In Harrisburg, we had
discussed a honeymoon “traveling
in the Southwest”.  When we needed an address for forwarding mail,
I suggested general delivery, Prescott, Arizona, because Prescott was
one place I definitely wanted to visit.  From that, he had gotten
the impression that I intended for us to settle down in Prescott for
the winter.  He thought we would find jobs or something there, and
make money.

Since he hadn’t verbalized any of these assumptions I was under the
impression that we were going to travel and have a honeymoon.  All
of this came to light when we were in Canyon de Chelley and he asked me
where we were going next.  I said, “I don’t know.  Where
would you like to go next?”  He asked me when we were going to
settle down in Prescott, and my answer was a blank look and something
like, “Settle down…?  Prescott??”

After I had made it clear that I didn’t consider Prescott a good
place to settle, and had protested that he hadn’t said a word all along
about settling anywhere, we got down to figuring out where to go
next.  I said that Spirit was pulling me, “that way,” and I
pointed sorta south-southeast.  He asked, “How far that
way?”  I said, “I don’t know… just THAT way!”

We were standing in the parking lot at the Visitor Center in Canyon
de Chelley, with my Crystal Oracle and the Auto Club of Southern
California map of Indian Country spread out on Gina’s roof.  With
the help of the oracle and a pendulum, we settled on the Mimbres area
of Southwestern New Mexico as our destination.  I still did not
understand that he intended to stay there, but by the time we got there
he had made that clear to me.

I let him know that his expectation that I find a job was
unreasonable.  I consider myself hardcore unemployable, and it is
with pleasure and pride that I say that. I had a vocation, a
profession, and I arranged to have my mail forwarded so I could do
readings, got him to buy me a typewriter to use for them, and had
business cards made up so that he and I could do psychic and shamanic
work while we were there. 

We found a trailer for rent cheaply in the little town of Bayard near
Silver City.  He started looking for work and soon discovered that
the area was economically depressed.  The only job he found was a
gig a couple of evenings a week as a nude model for an art class at
Western New Mexico University.  Then he discovered that he could
teach a shamanism course there in the continuing education department,
and
he did that, to two cycles of students in the course of that
winter.  From the business cards we tacked up on bulletin boards
all around the college campus, at the food co-op, herb shop,
laundromats, etc., we also got some shamanic work such as entity
release (ghost-busting, exorcism).  Through my efforts to include
Greyfox in my work, he also
discovered that he does even better past-life readings than I do.

There is more to this honeymoon story, but it will have to
wait.  I have blogged previously about some of our past lives
together.  The one when we were twins is here, and the one when we were star-crossed young sweethearts and I ended up haunting him after my death, is there.  Another blog, about past-life recall generally, is elsewhere.

The next installment of this story is Part 3. 
The movie shown below as “currently watching” was filmed in the part of
New Mexico where we were, during the time we were honeymooning
there.  Greyfox met the director and some of the cast and
production crew, but doesn’t remember much because he was in an
alcoholic blackout.

Edited, revised and updated November 10, 2005.

This silver-haired double Libran Pennsylvania Dutch member of the
Muscogee Nation is my soulmate, too.  He has my butterfly moniker
tattooed on his arm.  He has kokopelli on his chest, also, but
that’s another story.

We met in a strange enough way.  He was in Pennsylvania, in a
3-piece suit, with a career in state government.  He had only
just recently been drawn into earth religions and his shamanic
initiation.  Fox came to him in a vision, a wet, bedraggled Fox,
and this man whose mother calls him Jim (in the Southern, two-syllable,
way:  Gee-yum), let Fox in, changed his name to Greyfox, and
began editing and publishing The Shaman Papers, a little newsletter to
help him learn more about his calling.

I was in my little place just across the highway from here, earning
my living with mail order readings, “fortunetelling” booths at several
summer festivals [I don't use that word, am not a fortuneteller, but it
is often applied to me], and a subsistence lifestyle.  Doug
was in third grade.  I had a request for a reading from the
publisher of another small pagan newsletter, The Graverobber’s
Gazette.  He was so happy with my work that he wrote a favorable
review and gave me a free full-page ad in his newsletter.

Greyfox had a reciprocal subscription arrangement with TGG and he
saw the ad and review there.  He wrote to me for a reading. 
It was a brief reality check and he says it was so spot-on that it
seemed as if I’d been reading his mail.  Because I didn’t demand
cash payment and because he was a cheapskate, he mailed me a box of
stuff for barter that included some beautiful crazy lace agate he had
tumble-polished himself, and crayfish pickled in formaldehyde.

He wrote to me again with some specific questions.  That was
December, 1989.  I was using a Canon Typestar word processor with
a 12-volt adapter, same as my radio and the rest of my electrical
system, powered by car batteries that I kept charged with a small Toro
generator.  The light was propane and the heat was wood just as it
had been since 1983 when Charley and Doug and I moved to the Su Valley
from Anchorage.  I was in the same brainwave state I usually work
in, Theta, just typing whatever comes into my head, much like blogging.

This is one of those scenes that exist in memory with surreal
clarity.  I had a tin of hard Christmas candies open and was
sucking on a raspberry drop.  I had answered all his questions and
finished proofreading before taking a second look at his letter to see
if there was anything I’d missed.  The thought came into my mind,
“this guy needs love.”  Just as quickly as that, I heard my voice
answering, “I love him.”

My policy, when I do readings, is to leave nothing out.  If a
client has no specific questions, I ask Spirit what the client most
needs to know.  When they do have questions, I always finish off
the session by asking Spirit if there is anything else the subject
needs to know that wasn’t asked.  Whatever comes into my mind, I
express.  I knew it was a bizarre and risky thing to do, but it’s
part of my deal with The Universe:  to tell it all and tell it
true.  So I added a brief, handwritten PS to the bottom of his
typewritten reading:  “I love you.”

Following that, the two of us had a series of compelling dreams
about past lives we’d spent together, and did a few intense past life
regressions.  Our letters shifted from a professional relationship
to a personal one.    After about four months, he phoned
me.  We both had big phone bills for a few months after
that.  Then around the end of June, he visited us and stayed
through July.  In the middle of August, Doug and I flew to
Harrisburg to help him move up here.

Greyfox had two vehicles, a GMC Jimmy 4WD, and a sweet little Fiat
X1/9.  He was trying to sell the Fiat, had it parked at the curb
with a “for sale” sign, when it was rear-ended and its frame
bent.  He collected the insurance on it.  Then he got cold
feet about moving to Alaska.  He was ready to buy Doug and me
plane tickets home because I refused to move to PA.  I suggested
he give me the Fiat, instead.  I had already promised Doug an
educational trip across the US.

I was all packed, with camping gear for our trip, when Greyfox again
changed his little Libra mind and decided he’d go with us after
all.  We were still in Harrisburg around the end of October. 
This was 1990, in case you lost track of time there.  The three of
us drove to Winchester, VA, where Greyfox and I got married, and then
took Doug trick-or-treating.  On this coming Halloween, we will
celebrate our twelfth anniversary.  [November, 2005 update: 
this past Halloween, we observed our fifteenth anniversary.]

On
election day in November of 1990, Doug and I left headed south in the
Fiat, to visit Mammoth Cave and follow scenic Route 50 west through
Indian mound country.  I loved that car, still do.  If I get
rich, I’ll get her running again.  Greyfox had some loose ends to
tie up and an appointment with his shamanic mentor Crow in Indiana to
get a new tattoo or two.  He said he would meet us at Custer State
Park, S.Dakota in three weeks.  Doug and I visited museums,
natural wonders, Indian ruins and other attractions and traveled the
back roads all the way.

Greyfox’s style of travel is to enter an Interstate as if it were a
tunnel and stay there until he’d reached his destination.  He did
show up on time, just in time to miss the annual Bison Roundup and
Auction, but Doug and I had been there for two days, just
serendipitously arriving at the time of the big annual event.  The
photo above was taken in Custer State Park.  The burro banditos
had been grazing on a hillside above the road when we stopped at a wide
place to put together some sandwiches for lunch.  As soon as we
stopped they came over looking for handouts.  If memory serves, we
violated park rules by giving them some bread.

We
were in our tent at the campground in the park, downwind of an elk
carcass a pair of neighboring campers had hung in a tree (it was
hunting season), when Greyfox pulled in.  He was crying with
nervous relief at having made the rendezvous and found us.  He
told a story of getting lost trying to get off the Interstate in Rapid
City and on the road to Custer State Park.  [2005 update:  It
was his usual histrionic hyperbole, but at the time neither of us knew
anything about the grandiosity of Narcissistic Personality
Disorder.]  The next day when we broke camp, we went together to
Bear Lodge (Devil’s Tower, the rubble at the base of which is in the
pic above) where Greyfox communed with the spirits and picked up litter, while Doug
climbed on the rocks and I marveled at the geology of the place. 
I don’t recall discussing it with either of the guys at the time, but I
noticed then that each of the three of us was on a distinctly different
trip together.

Our next big destination, a place we were all drawn to, was Chaco
Canyon, New Mexico.  In PA we had marked a route on the map, based
on my desire and Greyfox’s stated interest for visiting some of my
favorite places in the Rockies.  Somehow, he missed the fact that
the route crossed and recrossed the Continental Divide a dozen
times.  Actually, we had even talked about that fact but he failed
to register that The Continental Divide was “in the mountains”. 
Maybe his Xanax had something to do with that.  He also neglected
to mention to me that he hated driving on narrow winding roads. 
The first time he said a word about that, we were near the Continental
Divide at Red Mountain Pass above Silverton, Colorado, where there is a
shrine memorializing the snowplow drivers who have perished on the pass
in the line of duty.

Either way from there, it was hundreds of miles of mountain roads to
anywhere at all.  He white-knuckled it and the three of us had our
usual diverse reactions to Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon.  We all
knew we had lived there before, and in addition to recalling vivid
memories of past lives spent in those places, Greyfox had a night-time
encounter in the snow with a skunk that sauntered down the middle of
the road ahead of him, looking back occasionally over its shoulder as
if to say, “follow me.”  Skunk [coincidentally?] is one of Doug’s
shamanic power animals.

After Chaco, we went to Balloon Fest in Gallup (just as when we
arrived at Custer in time for the annual roundup and auction, we didn’t
know we’d come to Gallup at Balloon Fest until we got there and tracked
down what was apparently the last available motel room), and then to
Phoenix and put Doug on a plane to Alaska in time to spend Christmas
with his dad and get back to school after New Year. 

Then Greyfox and I started the second phase of our
honeymoon.  The original plan (pre-wreck and pre-marriage) had
been that he would sell the Fiat and we would all go North together in
November, but his cold feet had left us with two vehicles to ferry
north and a compromise plan for Greyfox and me to spend the winter in
the Southwest and go north the following spring.

Right this moment (at the time of original posting, in 2002),
Fellowship of the Ring is cued up on the VCR and my two guys are
waiting for me.  They will continue to wait while I get myself a
snack and join them, but I don’t think I can stretch their patience
much more than that.  Does anyone want me to continue the
honeymoon story later?

Roof update:

This was sunrise this morning: a few breaks in the clouds.  With few exceptions, it has been either wet or windy or windy and rainy for days and days.  Every time the weather was agreeable, Doug was asleep or otherwise occupied. 

Today, his wake/sleep cycle is including more daylight hours awake.  He was ready for roofing.   About the same time we got on the roof it started to rain.  We got a little bit of roof work done, one tarp spread but not tied down or sealed.  I hope it doesn’t get windy tonight. 

This one today went over the chimney from the woodstove.  We had some conflict over how to do it, and Doug thought I wanted to do it the simple way to avoid the effort and exertion, when what I wanted to avoid was risk of damage to the stovepipe. 

He said he had watched me do it and he could remove the top section of stovepipe so we could slip the tarp over with less cutting.  Thinking he needed the practice, I let him take it apart.  The problem… problems started when he lifted without first twisting to disengage the top section at the joint with the one below.  He lifted three sections, and the remaining section at the bottom fell over.

Greyfox heard the noise from another room and came to see what had happened.  From the roof, I heard his yip, and then nothing else, until after Doug had lowered the big chimney pipe back down, bending the ends of both sections in the process.  After some feats of strength and skilllessness, we determined that we needed, for several reasons, to replace the entire stovepipe.

Doug went to bed.  You can read his version of the stovepipe story at his blog.  He was blogging about it as Greyfox and I went out the door to go to the hardware store. 

To replace one double-walled 3-foot section of smoke pipe and three 2-foot sections of Metalbestos®, I had to use a slightly different configuration because our local store didn’t have any of those things.  I ended up with two 2-foot sections of ordinary matte black smoke pipe, an adaptor for the top and 2 sections of Metalbestos®, 18″ and 3′ long.  There is also a collar and a cap, so we may have less water leaking in around the new pipe, and will surely have less moisture in the stove.  It hasn’t had a cap since we moved in here in ’98.

We had an interesting little Mercury retrograde contretemps in the hardware store as I was trying to mentally calculate what combination of available components would give me optimum function within recommended parameters.  Greyfox kept asking me why we had to do it this way, why we couldn’t just leave out that 18″ section or the adapter.  I couldn’t, apparently, answer him adequately, because he kept asking over and over.

My hands were full of stovepipe stuff and since words alone were not conveying my meaning and I was hampered in my sign language capabilities, I decided to set down my encumbrances.  Since I was going to free my hands, I thought I might as well draw him a diagram, but when I suggested that, he said, “I’ll take your word for it.”  I didn’t know what he was taking my word for, since I still had my hands full and hadn’t started my explanation.  My mother never could talk without using her hands, either.

While we were on our hardware run, our neighbor Jason dropped off half a cord of firewood, and just a little while ago brought the other half of that cord.  Another cord is coming tomorrow.  Big woodpiles are winter security.

The roof will get done.  A few days ago, while Doug slept, Greyfox acted as my ground support, and I got up there alone on a beautiful cloudless day and secured the antenna mast.

Because his job consisted mostly of standing by, and he tends to wander off if not occupied, I had Greyfox take some pictures.

He had a great time with the colors and composition, but he thought I should have worn something different.  The old beige turtleneck with tar on the sleeves wasn’t colorful enough.

I told him where my t-shirts were, and with a shout of, “Wardrobe!”, he tossed my red shirt up to me.

I obligingly changed shirts and finished nailing the mast to the side of the house with plumber’s strap.

Proud of his work before he even saw it on the monitor, he took this self-portrait for his signature.  Portrait of the artist as an old fart.  The old fart blogged today, too, before the stovepipe went awry.  It is, he said, a political rant, state politics specifically.  I haven’t read it yet, but I will soon.

There at his shoulder is one of my strips of plumber’s strap.  I did an okay job of strapping up the mast, except I’m going to have to adapt the tarp to it at top because I forgot to allow for overlap… oops.  Did I mention that Mercury is retrograde?

When I rescued my attack-trained New Jersey dog Angel from the Boulder pound (as related in a past issue of the redheads’ online magazine, Rousette), I already had a pet.

My boyfriend Stony and I were living in a big apartment building full mostly of students, faculty and staff from the university, with a sprinkling of hippies and dope dealers. We met a family traveling through in an old panel truck. They had a raccoon. He was captive-bred and about as tame as wild animals get… which is not very. His owners had fallen for him in a pet shop and shared their life on the road with him until he became too big and aggressive for them.

They gave Mr. Coon to us, to the boyfriend and me. Coon never bonded with the boyfriend although Stony did enjoy letting him ride his shoulder in public.  Very soon Coon and I became quite close. He was an extraordinary animal, as housepets go. The first evening we had him, while we were getting to know each other, he stole the ring off my finger, scampered into the dark bedroom and stashed it, then hurried back and reached for my hoop earring. Just as I have done when I had babies to care for, I stopped wearing jewelry for as long as I had Mr. Coon.

He soon trained me to keep an eye on his litter box and clean it frequently. If he went to make a deposit and found a previous deposit still there, he would throw out the old stuff and a lot of the litter as well. He also expressed his feelings with feces. On separate occasions, after run-ins with Stony, he left turds in Stony’s shoe and on his pillow.

He was so clever, it was a joy watching him try to solve problems of access to things and places we tried to keep him out of. It wasn’t always fun waking up to discover that he’d solved one of the problems as we slept. One time, he opened each of the drawers under the kitchen counter in turn, using them for steps. Once on the countertop, he moved the toaster to use for a step, and opened the upper cabinet door.

He could have had many goodies, but he contented himself with honey and oatmeal. He opened the screw top of the jar of honey and overturned it on the counter. He dumped the contents of the oatmeal box into the pan of water in his feeding area. His enjoyment of the meal was evident in the many tracks he made back and forth between the honey puddle and the gruel in his water pan.

Any solid food he ate, whether it was kibble or fruit or vegies or bread, went first into his water. I gave him a commercial food formulated for raccoons, and supplemented it with nuts, fruit and vegetables, but he had some of his own favorite snacks. He would try to beat us to the toaster when our toast popped up. Each time he found his way into a kitchen to steal food, he chose some kind of grain: the oats, a bag of wheat flour, boxes of cereal. A few times, I laid out newspapers for him and set in the center a small dish of honey and peanut butter.

He groomed himself much the same way cats do. He groomed me, too. I always had coon slobber in my hair. It freaked me a bit the first time he licked the corners of my eyes, but after a while I got used to that. I got used to a lot of things with Coon. I don’t think I ever taught him anything, but he did a lot of training on me.

Late one night we were awakened by a knock at the door. Before opening it, I looked around for Coon, to be sure he wasn’t poised to scoot out at his first opportunity. No problem. What greeted me when I swung the door back was a tousled, irate man holding Mr. Coon at arm’s length by the scruff of his neck. We were on the third floor. Our irate neighbor had left his fifth floor balcony door unlocked. Coon worked the latch on our balcony door, slid it back and climbed two floors, and slid open his door. The couple heard him rearranging pots and pans in their kitchen.

When Stony and I moved out of our apartment into a big shared house with friends, we took Coon and Stony’s dog Smoky. Shortly after the move, I got my dog Angel. The dogs never learned to coexist with each other and were always fighting each other or the Rhodesian ridgeback owned by a housemate. There were also cats in the household who were frequently chased or cornered by the dogs. Coon had no problems with any of them. The cats retreated quietly when the raccoon swaggered into a room. The dogs couldn’t resist crowding in close to sniff at Mr. Coon, but when he swung on them with his chattering warning cry and showed his teeth, they backed off.

In each of the places where we lived, Coon found the most secluded spot for his den. Whether a closet, or a cupboard, or the space behind a sofa, his chosen places had one thing in common: defensibility. One of these places he picked, in the home of some friends of ours, was particularly inconvenient for the primates involved.

When our group expanded and moved from Boulder to Breckenridge to work on condo construction jobs, we settled, along with some other hippies, in the abandoned mining town of Tiger. Stony and I lived in an old school bus, and our friends moved into existing cabins, using plastic sheeting to cover the windows.

Coon, who stayed in the bus with us or on a chain attached to his collar from the bumper of the bus, quickly made friends. Kids and adults would stop to talk to him or to us about him whenever he was out on his chain. When we went to work, we left him out on the chain. Several people, including our good friend Zeke who also helped me exercise Angel, looked out for Coon while we were away.

One night we came home and saw Coon’s chain lying slack on the ground, with his collar still snapped onto it. One of our friends came from a nearby cabin to intercept us. He was wounded and agitated. He expressed concern about rabies, and we assured him that the raccoon’s immunizations were current.

He implored me to come and get my raccoon. I followed him to his cabin, where he stopped at the foot of the stairs and pointed to a curtain that covered a closet door on the landing at the top of the stairway. Keeping an eye on Coon for us was one thing, but approaching him or trying to pick him up was something few people besides myself would try. Stony had been slashed enough that he wouldn’t try to touch Coon. I knew how to do it, and could grasp him by the loose skin on his back until he got past his instinctive defensive response to being grabbed, and climbed onto my shoulder.

When he slipped his collar, our neighbors watched him nose around the compound, basically a short wide street with cabins on both sides and our bus in the middle. He entered the cabin by clawing a hole in the plastic sheeting over a window, and the neighbors watched him climb in and sniff around until he finally ascended to the closet at the top of the stairs. It was cute and adorable until someone climbed the stairs to one of the bedrooms up there.

Coon rushed out of his curtained den making the chattering noise that all our friends now recognized as a warning/threat. They backed off. Others tried it throughout the day, but Coon terrorized them all.  The second story was now his territory, it seemed.

My capture of the mad raccoon was anticlimactic. I lifted him by the scruff of his neck and he went limp in my hand. I cradled him in my elbow and let him climb to my shoulder. Then I put on his collar and leash, and we sat around in the neighbor’s living room, schmoozed, had dinner with them and went home.

During a hospitalization and my subsequent convalescence, my friend Zeke cared for Angel and Mr. Coon. It was winter, and raccoons are semi-hibernatory animals. They sleep all winter, rousing once or twice for a drink of water or a snack. When I was ready to retrieve my animal friends, Coon was asleep in the root cellar under Zeke’s cabin. We left him there, and when the thaw started, Zeke found Coon’s tracks leading down to a creek, where he lost the trail. We never saw Mister Coon again.

This is the chapter of my memoirs that follows my release from prison in 1971.  The story of how I came up with my moniker (that symbol with which I sign my work) fits in this same time period.  For  hot_sleep  and anyone else who missed it, that little story is here.

Stony was my first lover after I got out of prison. Not the first fuck after that year-and-a-half-long dry spell. That one was Glenn, a young friend and fellow speed freak, the only person not also locked up, besides my mother, who went to the trouble of writing to me while I was in the slammer. It was a letter to Glenn that broke the rules and lost me my job as prison librarian. It was dear friend Glenn who knew when I was getting out and found someone with a car to drive him to Salem and pick me up as I came out the gate.

They took me to the nearest mall, where I spent a big chunk of the $100 walking money the state had given me on a pair of jeans and a shirt so I could pitch the ugly dress Mrs. Burt had selected just for me. For a girl who grew up in overalls and jeans, wearing dresses for all those months was one of the worst things about prison. [Who would actually choose to always be choosing whether to sit and move like a lady or to be showing her ass?  Granny skirts are okay, and minis over tights or body suits if you have the legs for them (and I did), but flashing one's crotch in skirts that end around the knee can lead to trouble, and being distracted by one's clothing is just a drag.]

After the mall we drove back to Eugene, where I was hoping to find someone to drive me over the mountains to the High Plains to enroll in college. But first that afternoon, with sensitivity uncommon to the masculine gender, Glenn walked me down by the river, shared a joint with me, and gave me the only truly sweet charity fuck of my entire life. Or, maybe he just figured that after so long in jail I’d be easy pickins, with little risk of rejection. Either way, all same-same. It was sweet.

In Bend, where I knew no one, school got all my attention for the first weeks. I was carrying 21 hours of classroom work a week and had to jump through some hoops to get them to let me have that many. The academic load was easy, but social life was nowhere. I found one brief temp job cooking pancakes in an electric skillet all night in the mall on opening day of hunting season. Then I kept looking for some longer-term employment. My landlady, a nurse whose name was on the prison’s list of those willing to rent a room to a newly released ex-offender, had an FM radio and cable TV. By taking the cable off the TV and hooking it to the radio, I had good music while she was at work.

But I was about a decade older than my classmates and they seemed sorta intimidated by me for some reason. The only interesting instructor didn’t seem interested in me. There was an ex-Marine who took me to his room and showed me his Silver Star and Purple Heart, but we didn’t click, no chemistry there. Then one evening I was taking up space in a coffeeshop, reading, when I heard, “Hey, pretty lady, why so sad?” “Sad?!” Shit! All my life, through some quirk of genetics or something, when my face is relaxed others read it as sad. If you’ve gone through life being told to, “smile”, when you thought you were smiling, then you know how I feel.

The speaker was skinny but muscular, with a natural blond afro and red-gold beard, not hard on the eyes at all. I could overlook the hokey pickup line. I couldn’t take him back to the nurse’s house and he didn’t really have a place, so we ended up in the abandoned house where he and his two traveling companions, Jim and Rocky, had spent the previous night. He explained that they hadn’t intended to be there at all. They got on the wrong freight train and were many miles and at least one state line from where they had wanted to go. We drank wine, smoked dope, and Stony and I fucked. His appetite easily matched mine.  He was tireless, and his size would have intimidated a more timid woman.  At some point I started wondering if I was dreaming. Then I decided it wasn’t a dream; I’d died and gone to heaven.

To put the historical era into perspective, it was 1971. It seemed as if every unattached man my age, if he had survived that long, was either in jail, in Canada, or still in Vietnam, or else he was just back from Vietnam or getting ready to go. Stony was recently returned from the Nam. His discharge from the Army had come after he had stolen a Huey helicopter off the flightline. He remembered some of what happened next, but his recollections were  bizarre and only marginally credible. That’s understandable given that he was under the influence of opium, alcohol, weed, speed, and, by his account, “probably a couple of other things, too,” at the time.

Never in my life before or since have I known anyone who could function at such a toxic level as that man. It was scary sometimes. Maybe he couldn’t talk, or if he could it was unintelligibly slurred or, if intelligible, incoherent. But even if he couldn’t talk or make sense, he could walk, dance, laugh, and fuck. And drink… he stopped drinking when he either passed out or ran out. When he ran out of booze, the next move was directed toward getting more. I would sip wine along with him until I started feeling dizzy and flushed, then I’d switch to soft drinks.

He didn’t like getting drunk by himself. He used to wheedle me to drink with him the way some other men have pestered me to marry them. One time, only once, did I give in. I wanted to make a point, wanted him to see that my getting drunk would serve no useful purpose. Not that my plan really worked, but I wasn’t about to repeat the demonstration just because he wasn’t in position to see me fall off the porch and break my thumb.  It reinforced my knowledge that alcohol and I were not compatible, and that was the important thing.

The night of that party when I broke my thumb, Jim had decided to continue on south, the way they had been headed when they ran into me.  He led me into a quiet corner, told me that Stony wasn’t good enough for me, and asked me to go with him, but I was already bonded with Stoney, so I declined.  That might have been a mistake… who knows?

I kept going to school, and went back to my room at the nurse’s house to shower and change, even occasionally to sleep, until Stony and friends found us all a place to live together. It was a two-room clapboard shack on a horse ranch outside town.  By then there were six of us.  Rocky was still there, and there was John who owned a car and wore a black trench coat.  Robbie was a blond Dutchman whose green card had expired.  The guys had picked up a young woman who needed a place to stay.  Her name escapes me.  Hazel, the old woman who owned the ranch, could use the help of some strong young folks, and she was a mellow old bird, too. Scattered around the place were a number of shanties and old trailers that sometimes sheltered hobos and men of the road when they wanted some time off the road or they got too old or sick for traveling.

Near the ranch’s entrance was a vacant two bedroom house of native stone with a big fireplace, wood-fired kitchen range, and a few boxes and things we could see through the windows. We offered to clean up the place and move the stored boxes into the little house we had been living in, if she’d let us move into there. I saw her hesitate, but she shook her head and went for it, with a small enigmatic smile.

The stone house was haunted. (Details of that are in another entry here.) It was also big, cold, and hard to heat. I was at school all day, and the other female of the group spent her days on household chores and on caring for horses and the goats that were always trying to get into our house. The four guys did some fence and roof repairs for Hazel (we paid no rent, just worked for the space), but spent most of their time with hand saws and axes cutting up firewood for her stoves and our fireplace and cookstove.

I did almost all of our cooking, being the only one with any skill in that area. That part of keeping us fed was easy. The hard part was affording the food to cook. We did get a lucky break when a freight train derailed nearby. We all got hired for the few days it took to help clean up the wreck, plus there were boxcars full of canned fruits and vegies and we managed to sneak some dented cans home in addition to all we could rip open with hunting knives and guzzle right from the cans as we worked. None of us had any success at finding a steady job that paid anything, but we kept busy and got by.

It was December, windy and cold on the High Plains.  Stony started talking about getting a chainsaw and selling firewood.  He shopped around for a cheap used one he could fix up, something in our meager price range. Then an opportunity came up to slip the motor part of a small brand new chainsaw under my coat, minus its bar and chain, and I went for it. I got away with it, too, but a week or so later, after two of the younger guys had been to a saw shop in a neighboring town, shopping for a bar and saw chain, the cops got around to us. I was in school when they arrested Stony.

The guy and girl who hadn’t been involved in
either the theft or the misguided attempt to obtain parts, visited
Stony in jail.  He told them the cops were looking for the rest of us. 
The girl decided she’d had enough excitement, and went back home. 
Robbie, Rocky, and I fled south with John in his car.  He was from LA, and that was where he was headed.

We traveled all day and spent the next night in sleeping bags on a rocky beach on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, at the foot of the cliff where Marineland used to be.  I don’t recall exactly how we arrived at the plan to head east on freight trains, but John said the best place in Southern California to catch a freight was at the big freight yard in Indio.  He dropped us there as the sun was going down, then headed back toward LA.

…

Previously, I related some of the story of that freight train ride to Texas and back to California, in 2 entries beginning with “A Loaf of Lettuce and a Head of Bread” and concluding in “Loosends”.  Those posts essentially began the writing of my memoirs here.  Five years or so after I originally posted this story, I noticed that there was a lot I had left out, and posted some further details about that time in my life.

…

The next Spring, after that ride to Texas and back, I was enjoying the surf and surfers in Morro Bay with Aunt Goldie when Stony caught up with me again. His new friend Rocky was headed home to Oklahoma and had invited us along. He said his parents would be gone for the summer and their home was our home until the old folks came back. 

But first the other guy, John, wanted to visit some old school friends in Anaheim, so our direction leaving Morro Bay was south.  The photos here of Stony and me, (damaged by having the undeveloped film riding around in my backpack for months), were taken during that stay in Anaheim.

John’s friend Frank Bivins was one of the infamous local crew that had slipped over a back fence into Disneyland and “occupied” an island in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, folk heroes to our generation.  An iconic image of them holding up the peace flag and waving appeared in newspapers and magazines at the time, and was made into a popular poster.

After a pleasant visit, we were walking through this nice residential area toward the freeway, when I noticed a puppy following me. I stamped my feet and yelled at her to go home, but she just ran up and wagged her whole body at me. I have that effect on some animals, must be my scent or something. And animals have a similar effect on me. I let her come with us. It made hitchhiking more challenging, especially as she grew. At first I named her Lady, but she had too much spirit for that name and soon became Ladybitch. To judge by appearance, she was Alsatian and Afghan hound, a beautiful mix.

The three of us: Stony, Ladybitch and I, spent a few easy weeks in John’s little hometown, then hitched up to Wichita where I had relatives and old school pals. But my aunt was away for the summer and I couldn’t locate anyone else I knew. We went home the first night there with a group of hippie types (or what passed for hippies in Wichita at the time). We had met them in Riverside Park by following our noses to a circle where a joint was being passed. My “loaf of lettuce and head of bread” trick provided a meal that made us welcome guests.

We arranged to spend the night with one of this group, a young woman who lived not far from the party house we had gone to first. During the party, two other guys came in and handed out a few joints. My first hit off one of them didn’t taste right and made my head ring in a way that told me I didn’t want any more of that smoke. Stony the garbage head, however, only took that to mean this was something special, so he greedily smoked all of it he could get. It was Sunday night, and Red Skelton was on a TV that no one was paying much attention to.

My first, last, one and only lifetime taste of PCP had me a little bit out of it for a while. Next thing I knew one of these strange new friends was trying to tell me that my boyfriend needed my attention. Stony was in the bathroom, puking and raving about red skeletons coming out of the toilet after him. He wasn’t responding to any of the other people, just as if none of them was there. But at my voice he looked up, although he didn’t seem to see me. He was seeing things, to judge by his ravings, but I don’t think it was me. He appeared to be terrified at whatever it was he saw. He muttered about bloody skeletons and kept crying out, “Mama.”

He was still unresponsive but quite a bit quieter when the party wound down and our hostess was ready to walk home. True to form, Stony could walk okay, but he couldn’t see where he was going, and stepping up and down over curbs was beyond his capacity. For about six blocks, I walked him up and down driveways to circumvent curbs. At our destination, stymied by the porch and worried lest his voice wake her neighbors, our hostess and I turned him, sat him down and then dragged him by his arms into her house.

I’m not sure that Stony ever completely came down from the PCP trip. I was with him for more than a year after that and there was always a weird edge to him that hadn’t been there before. But that might not have been the PCP all that time. Soon after this incident, he started huffing insecticide and paint fumes, and a few months later he ate a bunch of poisonous mushrooms, so it’s hard to say why he was as he was, or even how he survived. Who knows?

We hadn’t been in Wichita very long when we heard that the Moody Blues were going to play a concert in Oklahoma City. We left Wichita three days early, and got horrible rides. We had just caught a ride with two weird, glittery-eyed motor-mouthed guys in a smelly old van and were coming into the outskirts of OK City sometime after dark when we heard a radio DJ talking about what a great concert it had been. The two fellas said we could crash at their place. In fact, they had a little travel trailer in the back yard at their exterminator shop, where we could stay. Back at their place, the fat one taught Stony how to squirt spray paint in a plastic bag and inhale the fumes. His skinny buddy with very bad skin preferred a rag soaked in insecticide. I wondered how I had ended up there (as I have wondered in many other places before and since), and went out to the little trailer and bedded down.

OK City was good to me. Within a few days I had a job dancing topless in a beer bar down the block from the exterminators’. My first night working there, a talent agent saw me and got me a series of auditions and soon a better job. But in what seemed like no time at all, I heard that there was heat on me there. Cops had been around asking about me. My last 3 days in town, I wore a wig and shades and avoided my usual haunts until I could arrange to get my paycheck and split.

Our first night out, we didn’t get far. A ride let us out within walking distance of a classic prairie reservoir lake recreation area. I pitched my tent in the campground and crawled into it with Ladybitch while Stony socialized with an old guy and his family who had a motorhome and a motor scooter and more than one bottle of whiskey. Near dawn he crawled in smelling of shit and vomit, crying and moaning incoherently. He passed right out and I left him there stinking alone while I went fishing.

When he woke that afternoon, he was in pain and could barely move. Those who had been bystanders the night before told us he had been riding the old man’s motor scooter and wrecked. I cleaned him up the best I could and we hitched a ride to town to see a doctor. X-rays showed some of the knobs broken off three vertebrae. He was ordered to stay off his feet, no heavy lifting.

The park had a 3-night camping limit, but the ranger who looked after the place said if I just moved the tent every three days to a different campsite, we’d be okay for the two weeks Stony was expected to be laid up. The lake had bountiful stocks of sweet-fleshed perch along its sunny margins, and the previous year someone had spilled a bag of dry beans in one of the campsites, which had grown into a mass of vines loaded with green beans. Those two staples and the quiet time spent fishing and foraging a few wild herbs and mushrooms for variety and flavor made this emergency layover one of the most pleasant intervals of my years on the road and on the run.

Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t idyllic. Stony was a grumpy, frustrated invalid and sex was out of the question. Ladybitch showed no interest at all in a roadkilled skunk on one of the park roads until it was several days ripely rotten, at which time she slipped her leash at night and rolled all over the stinking carcass. Then I got into some poison ivy. In my usual hyperreactive way, I swelled up and got a high fever, and another camper took me to the emergency room in town. They gave me some cortisone. It gave me ugly hallucinations and paranoid fantasies.

Other than that, it wasn’t a bad camp-out. Back at the campground an old guy with a Scandinavian accent said the best thing for poison ivy was “peeess on it”. The urine treatment cleared it right up, luckily for me, because the doc wasn’t about to give me more steroids, and I wouldn’t have taken any if he had. We had lots of time to discuss where to go next. Someone had told us there was a big “head scene” in Boulder, Colorado. I had aunts and cousins in both Denver and Boulder, so that was the way we headed when Stony was back on his feet.

Denver wasn’t a comfortable city. We were there only two days. We met only one person who really communicated with us. It was weird. This one passionate, nutty man who was going up to everyone in a city park, offering to teach them to meditate and detailing all the advantages of meditation, was the only person who did more than just nod or exchange howdies with us. Boulder had been our destination all along, so we left Denver and headed up there. The next day I was wishing I’d stayed in the park and meditated with George.

A short hitch, really, but on our third ride, in the dark, after spending most of the day beside the road with our thumbs out, we asked if the driver knew where we could crash or camp for the night. He said he knew a cave. It was where he slept sometimes. It was just a hole in the cliffside off a turnout on a winding dirt road a couple of miles off the highway. At dawn next day, we were awakened by a voice outside ordering us out with our hands up.

The cave was an old mine and we were trespassing. All three of us had to show ID. I wasn’t overly worried although I knew I was hot. My ID had been checked before and it didn’t hit on NCIC because of a clerical error. My name ends in a double letter, but a court clerk misspelled it with only one. The warrants had the misspelled name and my ID had it right. However, this deputy sheriff was smarter than that court clerk. He recognized that my name’s spelling was unusual and he called it in both ways. Bingo.

On the drive down into Boulder, the deputy and I talked and became friends. I knew that my father’s sister had lived there last time I heard from her, and he said he would try to look her up. A few days later I was called out of the day room to see the deputy. First, he gave me a really sad look and said he was horribly disappointed in me. He said our talk as he brought me in had left him with the impression that I was basically a “good girl”. Imagine his shock and chagrin when he got a look at my sheet, which went back to bad checks about ten years before and my jacket was stuffed with a lot of FBI surveillance pictures and info from when I’d been running with Hells Angels. I’d love to get my hands on some of those FBI zoom lens closeups. I’d replace my online profile pic with one and be cute again, for all the world to see. At this time, I was twenty-seven, and I would still be getting carded in bars when I was thirty. Freckles and baby fat and a sweet girly voice: I played them up for all they were worth.

After the deputy scolded me for having seemed to be a better person than I actually was, he said he’d struck out at trying to find my aunt. With Stony out there somewhere but too paranoid to come near the jail to visit me, my only other human contacts in those five weeks I was there were the jail’s matrons, the other inmates, a public defender, a couple of people from the DA’s office, and the doctor who, a week or so after I got there, confirmed my suspicion that I was pregnant. Some of the inmates were interesting, anyway.

Old manual skills came in handy. Cigarettes were very expensive compared to Bugler or Top tobacco in bulk packs. Most women bought the tobacco when the weekly comissary orders were taken. None of them had much cash in their accounts, and I had none at all in mine. Each pack of tobacco came with a small pack of papers. Not one woman in there could roll a cigarette with just one of those tiny papers, even smaller than Zig-Zags.

The dopers among them could usually glue two papers side-by-side and twist up a fat ciggie, but that meant that when the papers ran out there was still tobacco left, and still some days before the next ration came. I wouldn’t know from personal experience, never having gotten the nicotine habit, but they said toilet paper cigarettes were gross. I rolled their cigarettes, each nice firm neat one in a single paper. I could sit there on comissary day, while everyone yakked and laughed together, and roll up an entire pack of tobacco into ready-made smokes, stuff them back in the tobacco pack and keep a paper or two that I had left to help out someone else who ran out. For my services I earned candy bars from the commissary and extra servings of various things from our institutional meals.

The rumors of an active “head scene” in Boulder had been correct. I learned in jail there that the DEA was using the university campus and the hippies’ favorite park as training grounds for new agents. Flyers were circulated among the heads and dealers with photos of the undercover agents. I suppose those rookies were supplied with similar flyers showing the faces of some of the same ones who were studying their mugs at the same time.

Among the street people there were two communal “revolutionary” families: the STP family, whose graffitic logo was ubiquitous in those years on walls and bridges from coast to coast; and the Assholes, who were more radical and generally weirder. STPers were psychedelic freaks and every Asshole I ever met was a garbage head. Katy-did, the first friend I made in there, was an STPer. We clicked immediately, two red-headed Virgos. She was street-wise and talked tough, but she’d never been in jail before. Her crime was something minor and soon became irrelevant, when an FBI check revealed her to be a 14 year-old runaway from one of the Lakes states.

Around the time Katy left, Asshole Kathy came in, arrested for sleeping in a Salvation Army donation box. She brought my first news of Stony. She’d met the mop-topped skinny guy with the big beautiful dog while dumpster diving behind Safeway. Around the same time, I got a letter with his initials and no return address. It consisted entirely of the transcribed lyrics Led Zep’s song, Stairway to Heaven, in his handwriting on yellow legal paper. I never understood, and he was never able to explain it.

In the usually quiet cell block and the dayroom at its center, the clang of a door always startled us. If it wasn’t mealtime, then it had to be some message or a visitor, or the addition of another inmate. When the door clanged open to admit Celeste, she wasn’t about to walk through it willingly. The matron was struggling to deal with her keys while keeping a grip on the cuffs behind Celeste’s back.

This gorgeous dark-eyed brunette with legs all the way to forever was shrieking, “You can’t put me in there. My father’s a powerful man. You’ll pay. You’ll be sorry!” Bracing her feet against the door frame, she made the matron work for every inch of progress. But matron had inches of height on her and a significant weight advantage besides her job training. Celeste was dragged into the day room and across to my cell where since Katy had left I’d been living in luxurious solitary comfort. My preference was always the top bunk for its greater light, and that’s where I was reading while a few other women played cards in the dayroom.

The matron shoved Celeste in, took off the cuffs and slammed shut the gate of bars. I said, “hey!” and she apologized for locking me up early, but my cellmate was on lockup, so I was on lockup as well. Without pausing for more than to grab a quick breath, Celeste continued the hoarse hollering of threats and rash statements that, “they can’t”, do several of the things the disheveled matron and her male co-workers downstairs had already done–things like fingerprints and mug shots and that ugly sack of a dress.

She threw herself onto her back in the lower bunk and started banging her feet against the underside of the steel shelf that held my thin foam mattress. Someone in the dayroom howled with the pain of the echoing clamor in the metal room.

I hung my head over the edge of the bunk to get a look at this wild woman. I just gazed into her eyes until she noticed me there. Her jaw snapped shut and her noise ceased just like that. I said, “They can hardly hear you downstairs, but you’re deafening us up here. Knock it off, eh?” Then her lips quivered and the sobs started. By the time dinner was brought in to us, she had cried it all out and was in good enough shape to come out of the cell, take a look at the plate of slop and leave it for the rest of us to share as she flounced back to the bunk beneath mine.

The next morning her daddy got her out of there right after her arraignment on the crime of letting her dog run free in the park, but we would meet again.

I had been on the run for parole violation. The felony of which I’d been convicted had turned into a misdemeanor through legislation enacted while I’d been in prison. When the absurdity of keeping me locked up at state expense pending extradition was realized by the administrations of Oregon and Colorado, I was granted a full pardon.

I got directions to the park and went looking for Stony and Ladybitch. Stony showed up around sunset, and there was a dog with him, but it wasn’t the dog I was expecting. Some changes had been made.

Stony seemed very happy to see me. The gray husky beside him sniffed me and accepted me. Stony said, “Here’s your dog, Smoky. I got him for you after Ladybitch was stolen.” Smoky sat and gazed adoringly at Stony. The word got around among the hippies in the park that I was the one who had been in jail fighting extradition, and a small crowd gathered with wine, smoke, celery, cheese, and even an apple. It was all very pleasant. I told Stony I was pregnant, and I got more details about what happened to Ladybitch. His camp had been ripped off while he was away. The dog, the tent, some of our clothes and gear including my backpack were gone

But he had some good news. He was working, riding the bumper of a garbage truck around, dumping cans. The opportunities for scrounging were great and it paid real money. He had an apartment in one of the towering buildings across from the park, a place where many students lived, and a few dealers and others. As it grew dark, he led me across and up the block and into the elevator. In the hall outside his door, he said he was sorry, but there was something he had to take care of.

As we entered the living room, a girl who looked about seventeen came out of the bedroom in my granny dress. Stony introduced us and said now that I was out of jail she’d have to leave. She wept and clung to him a while and he patted her shoulder and I felt crummy, but she left–in my granny dress, but I wasn’t going to quibble over it.

Time passed. Katy-did showed up after having been put aboard a plane back to her parents and then turning around and hitching back to Boulder. I started meeting some of the STPers and Assholes I’d heard about in jail: people like Bear who preached violent revolution loud and long and late into every night, and Goldfinger who huffed nothing but gold spray paint. He looked kinda cute with the glistening highlights in his mustache and beard, but nobody was home in those eyes.

We collected a group of eight people and moved into a big house. As my birthday approached I managed to convince Stony that Smoky would never be my dog. He was bonded firmly to Stony and he was not my kind of buddy. Smoky wanted to romp and roll in the grass with Stony, not lay with his head in my lap as I sat in the shade and read. On my first full day out of jail, while Stony was at work, I walked Smoky to the park for a run. He ran away, and right back to me. Then jumping up in joyful enthusiasm, he tore my shirt off and ran with it so I’d chase. Not my kind of dog, but not a bad dog at all.

Stony got me another dog for my birthday. That story is a good one. It had been published earlier, in Roussette, an ezine at The Realm of Redheads, but that disappeared when the webmaster made some changes.  I seem to recall blogging a reconstruction, but apparently didn’t save a link to it.  How Angel came into my life, and why I named him Angel, remains for now another loose end.

It was windy and chilly around sunset.  I noticed that because I was in a t-shirt when I grabbed the camera and ran out to catch the light.