Signs of Another Time

“. . . go forth in love and peace — be kind to dogs — and vote Democratic"

Guess who said that.

The first year of my brief first marriage was also the year of the first Presidential election I was able to vote in.  1972.  Nixon had one term under his belt.   Muskie, McCarthy, and McGovern were struggling for the democratic nomination against each other and more importantly against George Wallace, an unrepentant racist who might as well have had horns growing out of his forehead as far as I was concerned.  I was still a teenager, but old enough to get married and -- since the voting age had been lowered to 18 the previous year -- old enough to vote.

Stuart had left his job at Lockheed in Los Angeles the year before to come home and farm with his father.  When we got married in December of 1971, I quit school half-way through my sophomore year in college to move from Austin (which had recently given birth to weird) to Roby (which was then and still is in a dry – and I don’t mean arid -- county smack dab in the philosophical heart of the Bible belt).  We moved into the first house Stuart had ever lived in – a two-bedroom, stucco, shotgun house five miles east of town; a hundred yards from Stuart’s grandparents’ larger, lovelier home; half a mile from his parents; a stone’s throw from the massive barn which was no longer used for anything except storing defunct tools and some hay.  Our house, like the barn, suffered from neglect, having stood empty on the wind-blown plains for over a decade.  In spite of that Stuart was tickled to be home, shed of the defense industry job that had got him a draft deferment.  And I was naïvely happy to accept things, like what house I lived in or the political habits of my new in-laws, without question.  The house faced south toward the highway which hurled whining semi-trucks and speeding cars past us on a straight shot from Fort Worth to Hobbs, New Mexico.  Behind us was a field planted in cotton, cradled on two sides by the Clear Fork of the Brazos.

Inside the house, Stuart and I were cracking open the lid on Pandora’s box.  This isn’t a story about addiction or misspent youth or the many troubles we let loose in our lives way back when, though.  It’s about politics.

We couldn’t go on a honeymoon after the wedding because the cotton hadn’t been harvested yet.  Back then you couldn’t harvest cotton until after the first freeze had killed the plants, and there had not been a freeze in the fall of 1971.  The first freeze of the winter came in January launching every farmer in the county into the hardest job in the cotton-farming cycle – stripping.   Stuart and the hired hand spent painfully cold days, working their way through acres of cotton, taking turns driving the stripper or standing in the trailer behind to stomp the cotton down into the trailer bed before the howling wind blew it away.  It was a bitter piece of physical labor.  But that’s the way it was done.  Then.  In 1972 there were not even any air-conditioned tractors in Fisher County.   Everyone plowed in an open-air tractor and harvested in an open-air stripper without even the benefit of radios.   Sometime in 1973, Stuart got wind of a new tractor on the market, a John Deere with an enclosed, air-conditioned and heated cab.  He immediately began lobbying for one.  But his father, who was his partner and no longer spent anytime on a tractor himself, thought it was an unnecessary extravagance. 

Stuart’s father was an archetype right out of a Southern gothic novel – big, powerful, demanding, smart.  He had been a Senator in the state legislature and had run for Congress. He was also the Chairman of the Fisher County Democratic Party, a position he took seriously.  He believed that politics was a serious business.

Come primary day in the spring of 1972, everyone in Stuart’s family – mother, father, grandparents, sons, daughters, daughter-in-law – went to the courthouse for the precinct convention, which, as anyone who’s ever been to their precinct convention knows, did not warrant the name “convention.”  Maybe twenty people gathered in a conference room upstairs in the courthouse.  About half of them were my relatives so it wasn't exactly intimidating.

When the time arrived to declare which candidate you supported for the Democratic nomination, I came out in favor of McGovern.   I found out on the drive home that Stuart considered that an act of naivete.  He had remained undeclared -- I think others in his family did, too -- a move he thought improved his chance of being elected as a delegate to the state convention in San Antonio.  The way the Stuart explained it, if the Wallace supporters didn’t know who you actually did support they might think that you supported their candidate and vote for you as a delegate.  I doubt that anyone in Fisher County was that dumb.  Even the Wallace supporters.  It was no secret that Stuart’s family leaned to the left, and Stuart had a pony tail.  It didn’t really matter though.  No one else was interested in going to the convention so Stuart and his brother were unanimously elected as delegates just on the basis of announcing their availability. 

Although McGovern did ultimately get the nomination, I doubt it was because of the maneuverings of savvy supporters in the heartland.  But honestly, there was enough at stake with Wallace as a contender to make any effort to block him worthwhile.  And who knows?  So many trivial and important things were at play.  Muskie cried, for God’s sake.  Actually, I think his voice just cracked, but apparently that was enough to get you run out of town on a rail in 1972.  Someone shot Wallace a week after the precinct convention.  Funny to think that both those events had the same impact on the candidacy of those two men.

Everyone in Stuart’s family was pleased with McGovern’s nomination.  I was, too.  McGovern was against the war which was the issue I cared about.  The war, the draft, and the atrocities of war that we glimpsed every night on the 6 o’clock news.  Those were the things I cared about. 

I’d never heard of Agent Orange in 1972 so I didn’t know to care about that.  I wouldn’t hear about Operation Ranchhand and the chemical defoliant U.S. troops were using in Vietnam for tactical purposes until long after the war was over.  I remember now, though, that the hottest topic of conversation at the Fisher County Farmers Union meeting in the summer of 1972 was the new product the Treflan salesman was peddling – a defoliant that worked.  The conversation only penetrated the periphery of my consciousness.  I didn’t want to be at the Farmer’s Union meeting, but, like the precinct convention, skipping it did not appear to be an option in Stuart's family.  I had no interest in or opinion about any topic of conversation at the meeting including defoliants or anything else to do with the farm.  I knew more about what was going on in Vietnam than I knew about the farm.  But I find it interesting now to look back and realize that by the mid-70s none of the farmers in Fisher County had to wait for the first freeze to strip cotton.  Sometime around 1972 they started using defoliants which meant that the cotton could be harvested in the fall. By that time the defoliant they were using had been field test thoroughly in Vietnam.

Stuart didn’t strip cotton in the fall of ‘72, though.  He and I had moved back to Austin that September so that he could begin law school and I could pick up my undergraduate education right where I had left off -- studying too little, barely squeaking by academically, partying too much.  We went to hear music a couple of times a week.  We saw movies constantly.  I had lunch every day in the Chuckwagon, a cafeteria style restaurant on the ground floor of the Student Union; I would often miss classes to sit in the Chuckwagon all afternoon talking about politics or books or time travel with other students who fancied themselves students of life and could argue passionately that institutional structures and strictures (like classrooms and classes scheduled at particular times) actually interfered with real learning.  Sometimes I would tell people that I went to the University of Chuckwagon which I thought was a pretty funny joke.  I loved the Union – smoked cigarettes and read in the corridor upstairs, listened to music at Potpouri which is now the Cactus Café, and went to all the lectures.  That’s how I saw Linda Jenness, the Socialist Workers’ Party candidate for President, speak.  I left that lecture all fired up, feeling elated that finally a candidate had articulated my thoughts and values, clearly and unequivocally. 

McGovern had slipped in my estimation.   I still feel a little upset when I think of Thomas Eagleton.  The fact that McGovern dumped him as a running mate when it came out that Eagleton had had electroshock therapy seemed to me like an unforgiveable act of disloyalty and cowardice.  Truth is, the Eagleton debacle sat so wrong with me, that years later when Gary Hart tried a Presidential run, I wouldn’t consider supporting him simply because he had been McGovern’s campaign manager.  Needless to say, I was not feeling enthusiastic about McGovern in the fall of 1972.  On top of his disloyalty to Eagleton, in every campaign ad McGovern sounded like he was apologizing for opposing the war.  And the closer we got to election day the more apologetic he sounded.  I couldn’t understand why he didn’t just hammer the points adamantly – the war is wrong; the draft is wrong; I will end the war, bring our troops home, and offer amnesty to those who left the country to avoid the draft.  I couldn’t see what was hard about that.  I was that young.  

I’d never heard of absentee voting, but that was the rule in Stuart's family, not the exception.  That way if you died before election day, your vote would still count.  Since I did not doubt the family wisdom, I was a willing soldier in their army.  When the general said, “Vote absentee,” I voted absentee.  But when I cast my early ballot, I voted my conscience and instead of voting for George McGovern I voted for the candidate I thought would do the best job – Linda Jenness.

I didn’t tell Stuart.  I didn’t tell anybody that I had voted for the Socialist Workers’ Party candidate.  Didn’t seem necessary for one thing.  For another, it was my business who I voted for.

On the weekend before election day, Stuart and I went home to Roby and stayed over until Wednesday.  That seems odd now because Stuart was actually an excellent student and never cut classes.  Still that’s what we did – we went to Roby for the election.  As if it were Christmas or Thanksgiving.  On that Tuesday we didn’t go to the courthouse to vote because, of course, we had already voted, but when the polls closed we all – again, father, mother, grandparents, children –  went to the courthouse.  We weren’t the only ones.  The courthouse square was bustling with cars, and inside people were busy doing the work of citizens. The industrious and mature, like my Aunt Fi, were working, counting votes, posting the count on the big black board above us in the lobby. The rest of us, like me, were just hanging out, watching the numbers go up on the board.

That’s when things got tricky.  The first number to go up and the only count that never changed on the blackboard all night long was the tally on absentee votes. Turns out eight people had voted absentee in Fisher County that year.  When the votes were posted in big, neat numbers so that the old folks wouldn’t have to squint, it was revealed that seven of the absentee voters had voted for George McGovern.  One had voted for Linda Jenness. 

I hadn’t anticipated the blackboard and it didn’t occur to me when I cast my ballot that so few people voted absentee. 

Who?  I heard people ask around me.  Linda Who?  I have an image of Stuart’s father looking at the blackboard.  He knew, of course, as we all did, that all eight absentee votes had been cast by his family.  He’d distributed the ballots himself.  He also knew that anyone with a lick of sense in the room would know that all the votes in the absentee column were his family’s.  But he met the information on the blackboard with a poker face, and I never saw him look at the numbers in that column again. The younger generation of the family eyed each other and me cautiously. Trying to figure out which one of us had violated the family code of honor.  I sat there all night, with the good citizens of Fisher County, looking quizzically at Linda Jenness’s name on the board as if I wondered who she was, too.   I avoided making eye contact with Aunt Fi who had remarkable analytical skills and didn't appreciate many of the choices I was making that year to start with. 

I don’t remember hearing anyone explain who Linda Jenness was.  I didn’t hear anyone say “You’re kidding?”  or “Socialist what?  What party?”  or even “I’ll be damned.”   But as the evening wore on I realized that people were no longer asking the question. That’s how gossip works in Roby.  It’s what you don’t hear that you need to worry about.   The truth of what people think or say about you lies behind a mask of civility and layers of triangulation, and once public opinion starts building against you, you're up to your eyebrows before you know it.  Good mothers in Fisher County teach their children that lesson when they’re very young.  I didn’t make a conscious decision to be a chickenshit that night, but I didn’t step forward and save Stuart or anyone else in his family from being undeservedly labeled a socialist.  I’m sure it didn’t occur to me to worry about their reputations.  And to tell the truth I wasn’t worried about any of our reputations as much as I was worried about being discovered as the traitor in our voting block.  I was so consumed by that worry that I barely noticed that the opponent of any candidate I would support – Richard Nixon – won the election.

Oddly, Stuart’s parents never mentioned Linda Jenness after election night.  In my presence at least.  I imagined they must’ve puzzled over it in private.  But I was confident they had no idea which one of the younger generation was the outlier.  I wasn’t the only rebel in the bunch by a long shot. 

Sometime after the election, though, I had a conversation with Stuart’s father that probably gave him some satisfaction.  I told him in a moment when we were oddly alone that I thought you should vote for the best candidate, the candidate you believed would do the best job.  I said party affiliation didn’t matter.  Or if it did, it ran a distant second to the importance of the individual.  That seemed like a no-brainer to me and I was shocked to discover that Stuart’s father adamantly disagreed with me. He said that an individual doesn’t have enough power to get anything done.  The individual has to work within a party to have any strength, and the party is much more powerful than any one candidate.  If you want to change something, if you want to make things better, he advised me, work within the party.  Shape the party.  Make it see the issue you care about. Get the party to put its weight behind platforms and initiatives that reflect your beliefs.  The candidate comes later.  It’s hard to remember the specifics of things that long ago especially since I was probably high and trying to hide it, but I remember my imposing father-in-law giving me a piercing look and saying something along the lines of  “You think everyone deserves a fair shot.”  He had an expression on his face that suggested he was old and wise and would be amused at how young and naïve I was if it weren’t so tragic.  A look that made me suspect he knew I was voting for socialists.  As intimidating as he was, his arrogance made me mad and I came back with a defiant, “Yes, I do.”  He said, “I do, too.  That’s why I’m a Democrat.”

Yesterday I heard a report on the radio about why young people don’t vote.   In interviews, young non-voters said that they weren’t interested in the election, that they don’t know enough, that the candidates are all the same, that their vote doesn’t matter.  I felt sad listening to them and wished that I could give them a fraction of my own abundant emotion about the election.  To this day there is something about the Presidential election that inspires awe in me. The significance of what we all participate in – Republicans, Democrats, Libertarians, and Socialists alike – seems sacred and wonderful to me.  I always feel tears welling up when I vote.  It’s almost like having a hormone imbalance.   Four years ago around this time of year, as the likelihood of a miracle – that in my lifetime we could move from George Wallace as a possible candidate to Barack Obama as President -- loomed larger everyday, I began to feel like I was going to burst into tears all the time.

I look back on my first Presidential election and I think about how naïve we were.  And how that blinded us to things.  For instance, how is it that we bought defoliants hook, line, and sinker two years after the first Earth Day, a decade after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring?  And kept buying them after we found out about Agent Orange?  I think about the advice Benjamin Braddock got in The Graduate: “Plastics.”  We were savvy enough to know how clever that joke was, smart enough to see where we were headed.  But not smart enough to take another route.  Maybe we were lazy.  Or high.  Maybe none of us – even the hardworking and sober – could handle the complexity of everything.  But today I find myself being nostalgic and wishing farmers would have kept stripping cotton in open-air strippers after the first freeze. I realize that it's easy for me to wish that since I don't plant or plow or harvest anything.  But I can't help noticing that some progress has hurt more than it's helped.  I also wish I could take every young person who doesn’t vote and sit them down in the old county courthouse in Roby, Texas in 1972 to watch citizens of all stripes tally votes on a blackboard till way past bedtime.  Till all the votes were counted.   It’s hard to live through that and think it doesn’t matter.

It’s all about politics.  The semi-trucks on the highway, the cotton field behind the house, the Farmer’s Union meeting, racism, shock treatments, stripping cotton, skipping class.  All politics.  That’s why it’s a serious business.  That’s why little things -- like showing up at the precinct convention or paying attention to the conversation at the Farmers’ Union meeting or voting -- matter.  That's probably the most important thing I learned in 1972.  I imagine George McGovern and Thomas Eagleton and Linda Jenness all three would back me up on that.

“. . . go forth in love and peace — be kind to dogs — and vote Democratic"

Senator Thomas Eagleton’s dying wish

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSYzSMbwpx8&feature=share

Sign of a Cat

Sign of a Cat 

I didn’t grow up around people who had a great affection for cats. In Roby, cats are half wild. And more coincidental (as in “He just wandered up one day”) or utilitarian (as in “Not much to look at, but, man, she’s a good mouser”) than companionable. Nobody in my family really held cats or played with them. “House cat” was a special term applied to the odd feline who got to come inside. Sometimes. No such thing as a cat who didn’t go outside at all. I never knew anyone who had a litter box until I was grown.

When I met JB he had a black and white cat named Babe.  After Paul Bunyan’s blue ox.  Though I recognized that JB was fond of Babe, I didn’t understand it in the same way I understood love for a dog.  To tell the truth – either because of my raising or some essential shortcoming in me -- I probably really didn’t even view cats as capable of a loving relationship.  Needless to say, I didn’t forge a bond with Babe myself.  I didn’t dislike her.  It just didn’t occur to me to interact with her.  Since she apparently felt the same about me our relationship was a non-issue. 

I lived with her for twelve years though.  She remained, throughout that time, JB’s cat.  He petted her, played with her, made fun of her, talked to her, teased her.  And when she disappeared, he mourned her in a way I’m ashamed to say I didn’t even grasp.  By that time, Nick was four or so and one of the division of duties JB and I had unconsciously adopted as young parents was this:  I was in charge of children; JB was in charge of pets.  We were both pretty happy with the division.  JB was devoted to our animals – two dogs – Pecos Bill and Thalia: Babe; a tank full of fish; occasional lizards or other wild animals foolish enough to be captured by a pre-schooler.  And JB seemed perfectly happy to basically nod and say uh-huh when I obsessed over Nick’s fine motor skills or signed us up for a parenting class. 

We lost Babe and both dogs in the span of a few months.  Thalia died of old age.   Pecos Bill, who had always been as wild as his namesake, went a little wilder when she died.  He got out of the yard one day, which was a common occurrence since escape was his on-going mission in life; only that day JB never tracked him down eating garbage or chasing squirrels a few blocks away, and Pecos Bill never came back of his own accord.  A month or so later, JB was driving his pick up to work and heard a cat meowing.  He stopped at the corner of Airport and Lamar, got out, and looked to see if Babe or another cat was stowed away in the bed of the pick up.  He didn’t find any sign of a cat so he scratched his head and went on to work.  We never saw Babe again, though.  JB went back to that intersection with flyers.  He walked that neighborhood and ours searching for Babe.   He was already going to the Town Lake Animal Shelter every week to look for Pecos Bill so he started touring the cat cages there, too.  He never found either one of them.  

We went a year with no warm-blooded pets until finally for Nick’s fifth birthday JB and I decided to surprise him with a dog. We ended up choosing a beautiful two-year-old female golden retriever named Bo.  On the way home to an unsuspecting Nick with Bo panting behind us in the backseat, JB turned to me, tears brimming his eyes, and said, “I feel as if a hole in my heart has been healed.”

When JB died two years later, one of the great, uncalculated tragedies was the loss the pets endured.  I never came close to filling his shoes.  I wasn’t even doing a good job with my designated responsibility -- the child.

Bo lived for another nine years and gave birth to a litter of puppies, one of whom Nick talked me into keeping in spite of the fact that I didn’t think we were taking good care of the animals we had.  Nick named the puppy Moon.  Short for Moonstone.  The other two pups in the litter he named Garnet and Sapphire, a sweet homage to JB who was a jeweler and collected gemstones.

Moon was a goofy, galumphing puppy when I started dating Kent.  There was something so hopeful about living with a puppy.  Moon’s cheerful optimism still seems to me all wrapped up with the great blessing of falling in love with Kent who healed a hole in all our hearts.  

A few years ago, when it seemed clear that Moon was nearing the end of his life, Kent and I started talking seriously about getting another pet.  Bo had died a few years earlier.   Neither of us wanted to be without a pet.  But we weren’t sure we were ready for another dog.  Yet. Kent was coming up for a sabbatical at the end of his term as Associate Dean and we wanted to take an extended trip tacked on to the study abroad course I was scheduled to teach in Spain.  Finally we decided on a lower-maintenance pet for the immediate future.  We’d get a cat. It would be easier to arrange care for a cat while we traveled.  Then we’d think about a dog when the sabbatical was over.

So that year when my birthday was about to roll around, I told the kids that what I wanted was a cat.  Unfortunately Lana and Emily, who, like JB, love animals as much as Tony Soprano does, were both in Boston so they couldn’t participate directly in the selection, but the rest of us -- Nick , Josh, Kent and I – all went together to the Town Lake Animal Shelter on the day before my birthday to pick out a kitten.   I didn’t tell anyone, but I really wanted a black and white kitten.  Like Babe.  I didn’t tell anyone because it seemed unfair to Kent for me to want a cat that looked like my dead husband’s cat. 

 Kent remembered meeting JB at a party at Debi and Lynn’s one New Year’s Eve.   JB was reading tarot cards for people.  I didn’t meet Kent at that party; I don’t remember meeting him until years later.  I don’t think he and JB could have exchanged more than a few words.  Still Kent thought of JB as a friend.  That’s the kind of guy Kent was.  He thought of people he liked as friends even if he’d only spent moments with them.  On top of that he wasn’t jealous.  So he never seemed to view JB as a rival.  On the other hand I think he suspected that I loved JB more than I loved him.  That that young love was truer.  Stronger.

When you divorce you put away the pictures of you and your ex.  Box up the sentimental souvenirs.  Get rid of the reminders of a love that didn’t work out.  It may take a while, but everyone pretty much agrees that that’s the right thing to do.  Make a clean break with the past.  With a death, it’s different.  You keep the pictures out so that your child will remember what his father looked like.  What it looked like to be held by someone whose touch is now forgotten.  What his mother and father looked like together.  And to remember that yourself.

After I married Kent, I used to dream that JB came back.  I would be so confused in the dream, kicking myself for having forgotten I was already married to someone when I married Kent.  I didn’t know what to do.  There was no taking back that I was married to Kent.  And I didn’t want to take it back.  But there was no taking back that I was married to JB, too, and that I didn’t want to take that back either.  It was agonizing.  There was no solution.  I couldn’t choose between them.  And the thought of rejecting either of them was impossible.  There was not even relief in waking, because the only pleasure of the dream – that JB was back – would be taken away.

Friends and family who came to the house and saw the pictures of JB in my study would sometimes comment on them.  Sort of warily as though even acknowledging their presence was tricky.  They’d ask if Kent minded.  Or they’d see the altar with JB’s boots beside it and say something about how tolerant Kent was.  But I couldn’t throw those things away as though that love hadn’t worked out.  As though the marriage had failed.  As though I was angry with JB and didn’t want to have reminders of him around.  Kent never mentioned the burden himself.  He never seemed uncomfortable with the memorabilia from another marriage.  He went with Nick and me to JB’s grave every year on the anniversary of JB’s death.  If he spoke of JB, he spoke as though they regarded each other fondly.  But still it caused me confusion, and I’m sure it did Kent, too.  And it was clear that to the world it seemed odd – maybe even disrespectful to Kent -- that I would keep JB present in my life.  

The truth, waking or sleeping, though, was not that I loved Kent less than JB.  I just loved them both.  I knew that it seemed unfair or unacceptable.  That the living are not supposed to have to share with the dead.  But I couldn't help it.

So I didn’t tell Kent that I wanted a black and white cat.  I didn’t mention Babe.  I didn’t remind Nick or anyone else that Babe was black and white.  But secretly that was what I was looking for the day before my birthday at the Town Lake Animal Shelter. 
 We went through all the cat cages.  So many cute kittens it was overwhelming.  Is there really any to chaff to separate from the wheat when it comes to kittens?  We were in the last wing of the cat cages.  I had stopped to look at some kittens that were white with a few black markings -- thinking that they were sort of a mirror image of Babe, maybe not quite as blatant a replica as what I had in mind -- when Kent called to me from the caged room he was sitting in across the aisle.  I looked over to see a full-grown black and white cat rubbing up against Kent’s legs.  Kent was very purposefully not touching the cat.   Instead, he was sitting with hands at his side – proof that he wasn’t manipulating the situation -- watching attentively as the cat climbed into his lap and made himself at home.  Kent looked over at me and smiled his big smile.  Turned out the cat was an eight-year-old male named Romeo.

Romeo.  JB and I had spent hours when we were first falling in love trying to come up with an anagram that would weave our names together.  The one we finally settled on was Dickie Romano.  That’s all the letters in Moore and Kincaid rearranged. Who knows why we wanted an anagram? We were doing a lot of other foolish things at the time.  Like sitting on the same side instead of across from each other in restaurant booths.  Writing poems for each other.  Telling each other every single dream we’d had the night before.   Fixing each other breakfast in bed.  Trying to guess what color or number the other was thinking of.  The anagram was just one more labor of love and we went through dozens of other options before we settled on Dickie Romano.  I knew from that process that Romeo is an anagram for Moore.    

I can’t say that there was no discussion after we first laid eyes on Romeo because there was.  We all thought eight was too old.  The math was inescapable: he wouldn’t live that long.  No question that a kitten was a better emotional investment.  So we went home without a cat that day, but that evening Kent and I kept coming back to Romeo.  When I finally said that maybe the point in adopting a pet was not just to serve yourself, but to help an animal that no one else was going to help, that cinched it.  We both knew that an eight-year old cat was less likely to be adopted than just about any cat we’d seen that day.   So on top of getting the cat we both really wanted, we got to feel virtuous about the sacrifice we were making in taking a cat with such obvious shortcomings.  The next day, Kent and Josh and Nick went back to the Town Lake Animal Shelter where JB had searched for Babe and Pecos Bill all those years ago, filled out the paper work, and brought Romeo home to me for my birthday. 

I know that this will sound like the hysterical idolatry the living always have for the dead, but Kent and I neither one could ever have imagined how crazy we would be about Romeo.  He was without a doubt one of the most charming -- if not THE most charming -- creatures, human or otherwise, I have ever known.  And that is something that I said about him while he was living.  Kent would nod in agreement when I said it.  We were both in awe of Romeo and our own good fortune in finding such a great pet.  Romeo didn’t have the typical cat qualities that had made me doubt the psychological trustworthiness of cats my whole life.  He wasn’t aloof.  But he wasn’t needy either.  Later, when I started writing a song to memorialize him, I’d start with that.

Romeo was a good lover
He gave his heart and soul
He didn’t play hard to get
He wasn’t needy; he wasn’t cold.

Not only that, he had a sense of humor.  I’m not kidding.  He would occasionally just collapse from an upright position and fall over sideways.  Kind of like the guy on a tricycle in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in.  He did it on purpose although the first few times you saw it, you’d think it was an accident or a catastrophe.  A carpenter working in the house called Kent one day at work to tell him that he was afraid something was terribly wrong with Romeo because he had just fallen down for no apparent reason.  But nothing was wrong and it wasn’t accident.  Romeo was just playing – doing something between flirtation and a prat fall.  As funny as Buster Keation.  As charming and self-deprecating as Cary Grant.  Kent was trying to train him to do it on command.  Romeo wasn’t a trick cat though.  He knew the fall worked because of the element of surprise.

A few years ago, when my old friend, Amy, met Nick for the first time since he’s grown up, I overheard her tell Nick, “your dad was wicked funny.” She was right.  JB could frame reality in a way that was spot on and unexpected and irreverent all at the same time.  Like calling Steel Magnolias "Beyond the Valley of Terms of Endearment" or referring to the God of the New Testament as The Big Muffin or interrupting the oncologist who was tactfully explaining brain cancer to us back at the beginning of JB’s diagnosis, to ask, “Are we talking drool cup, Doc?”   I am sure that if JB were alive today, he’d be doing comedy open mics around Austin.  Maybe he’d be professional.   If he were a cat, he would know how to time a prat fall.

On top of being funny, Romeo was tender.  He was not just looking for affection; he was giving it.  He would come sit in your lap and rub your chin or forehead with the top of his head.  Or he would nestle into the space between your arm and your side, hiding his head, in a way that made you feel both loving and beloved.  Or he would reach out and touch you with his paw while you were standing by the chair getting ready to go. When Moon was dying, Romeo would lie beside him, getting up occasionally to rub his head against Moon’s.

Now I’m not Juliet
But I long for a love that deep
As boundless as the ocean
As ripe for dreams as sleep.

And he was polite.  He would sit in a chair at the dinner table while we ate.  Sometimes he would put his front paws on the table, but he would never climb on the table.  It was as though he was emulating how we were positioned.  Joining us for a little fellowship around the table.

         
  
I know.  I know.  It sounds like I’m making a lot out of a little.  But Kent saw it too.  If anything, he loved Romeo more than I did.  Romeo would go to Kent as soon as he walked in the door, and Kent would walk around the house holding him.  When Kent sat down at the computer to work, Romeo would wrap himself around Kent’s shoulders.  In bed, Kent would make a space for Romeo in the crook of his arm, and Romeo would ease into the space and sleep there all night.   I’d be snuggled up to Kent on one side; Romeo on the other.

 Before Romeo got sick, Kent and I were actually talking about taking Romeo with us on a weekend getaway to the hill country in the spring.  We’d just take Romeo in a cat carrier with us to a pet-friendly b & b we knew about, set up a litter box when we got there, and hang out.  Just the three of us.  But Romeo died before spring had a chance to roll around.  It’s a mystery why.  The vet says maybe he drank some anti-freeze.  We had him for a year and a half. 

We were grief-stricken.  I curled up in the crook of Kent’s arm and cried every night when we got into bed without Romeo.

Sometimes love goes under cover
Gets poisoned or lost to war
Wish Romeo hadn’t died so young
Wish he’d lived to love some more.

When Moon died eight months earlier, it was expected.  He was old.  He was having a hard time getting around.  He was uncomfortable.  Always panting.  Always hot.  Couldn’t get up by himself sometimes.  Stumbled trying to get off the porch.  Death for him seemed like a relief from inability and discomfort.  There were no rewards in Romeo’s death.  It was unexpected and random and unfair.  My mother and father were both sick at the time, and I reflected some on how different an unexpected death is from an expected one.  On how hard it is to turn on a dime.  And how different it is to die when you’re old, when your children are grown, than it is to die when you’re young and your son is six.  Like JB, Romeo was ripped from us when we were still expecting so much more.  When we still had plans.

I told Kent that I was choosing to believe that Romeo could come back from the dead.  That I was sick of bowing to death.  I was going to keep believing that Romeo could return to us.  Who knew what things were possible? I started writing a song.  It was going to be a protest of death. 

Romeo was a true lover
His gaze was like a kiss
I pray and still hope someday
He’ll come back from the abyss.

Kent was always telling me I should write a funny song.  I was always trying to.  I think we both hoped a song about Romeo would have some humor in it.  I swear to God I have a good sense of humor, but put me to writing a song and I’m as serious as a heart attack.  Or anti-freeze.  One more thing I can’t seem to help.   The best I could do was achieve a little ironic subtext that really no one but me would get since, until today, I was the only one who knew I wasn’t just conflating my cat and the Shakespearean lover; I was weaving JB in there too, half believing that Romeo was an embodiment of JB. 

He would have kept watch from above her
Tried to touch her if he could
He would have stretched across the ether
To point the way to joy and good.

And once again the real irony is in the death I didn’t know about.  The other lover I was hiding my subtext from -- Kent -- the one who now seems the obvious subject of the lyrics.   I come up, over and over again, against my own arrogance and, over and over, I have this uncomfortable feeling that I should have been more humble.  That I shouldn’t have thought I could defy death by not believing in it.  That that was like daring a powerful opponent to squish me like a bug.  But then again isn’t it just more arrogance to think that it makes a difference what I believe or don’t believe?  Does it matter to anyone – deity or human -- that I wished JB could be reincarnated in a cat that would come live with me and Kent? 

Two and a half weeks after Kent died, Lana and Emily’s friend, Eyad, told them about a stray cat who had been visiting his backyard.  Lana and Emily were leaving the next day to go home for the first time since Kent’s death.  Once everyone was gone and the chaos of crowded rooms had died down, I would be living completely alone for the first time in 38 years.  No humans, no animals left in my house but me.  Lana and Emily wanted me to get a cat.  I wasn’t against it.  I was ambivalent.  Mostly, though, I just didn’t have the wherewithal to make something like that happen.  But they could.  And did.  Right then.  That day.  Emily, Josh, Nick, and I all went to Eyad’s and drove away with a 6 or 7-month old cat scratching inside a cardboard box on my lap.  In the driver’s seat Emily read my mind and said to me, “We could name her Juliet.”  That was the only discussion we had about the name.

Juliet is not Romeo.  She’s solid black for one thing.  But that’s okay.  I don’t feel so picky about color anymore.  And she doesn’t do prat falls or rub my forehead with hers.  But every night she gets into bed with me when I go to bed, snuggles up right next to me, and stays there all night long. 

Seems funny to me now that we almost didn’t get Romeo because he was eight years old and that meant we would only get to live with him for six or seven years give or take a few years.   Funny because once we had lived with him for a week, we would not, for all the tea in China, have taken back the decision to bring him home with us from the animal shelter even if we’d known he’d only live for a year and a half.  Before we loved him, we were arrogant enough to think that we could calculate the rewards of the relationship in terms like the number of years we’d get to spend with him. 

Still after everything, I half think I’ll just keep protesting death.  Keep refusing to believe in it.  Keep thinking that the dead will return to me.  That the veil between me and the other side is thinner than I once imagined.  And that Kent comes to me through a black cat, whose name is a synonym for love, and lies down beside me at night.

Romeo and Juliet

To hear Romeo -- the song -- click here.

 

Signs of the Other Side

The Blog Was Kent's Idea
*******

          Driving back to Austin from my mother’s funeral last April, Kent said to me, “you should stop writing fiction.”   We were somewhere around Cross Plains.  The angle of the sun was blinding – it was about 7 a.m.  It stuck in my head because I had been thinking the same thing.  Not at that exact moment.  At that exact moment, I was stretching, trying to wake up so that I could take my turn at the wheel. 

         But I’d been thinking about it in general.  Ever since I was invited to speak to my Sunday School class about my spiritual journey.  I had a lot of misgivings about accepting the invitation.  It wasn't  that I was worried about the people in the Sunday School class.  It’s not a doctrinaire church and an even less doctrinaire group in that particular class, so I knew they were open to unconventional paths.  In fact one of the first times I ever heard someone describe their spiritual journey in that class more than 20 years ago, the story involved an exploration of how LSD had positively impacted the speaker’s spiritual growth.  That was in my early days at University Methodist, and that morning was one more confirmation for me that in spite of the fact that I don’t believe (among other things) that Jesus died to atone for my sins or anyone else’s, here was a church I could attend.  Turns out it’s a church chock full of unexpected perspective and honest doubt.  I feel right at home and never have any qualms about the many things I don’t believe.  I do believe “Love your neighbor as yourself” is a good code to live by.  And I believe there’s something greater than the here and now, something unseen that sometimes penetrates the veil.  I have an almost primitive urge to at least acknowledge the unseen.  And to honor the dead, those who have gone before, the connection I still feel to them.  I don’t know how to do that, and church seems like a good way to try.  Even if I don’t believe much in the apostle’s creed, I like reciting it with other people who have the same urge I have to honor something we can't fully understand.  Still I had struggled over describing my spiritual journey in Sunday School before I was scheduled to speak and thought until the very morning I spoke about pulling out.  It wasn’t so much worrying about having something to say as wondering how much I should leave out.  My drug use?  The dreams?  The sex in the dreams?  The visions and visitations?   I wasn't nervous about my Sunday School class particularly.  I'm just nervous about talking about those things.  In general I’m afraid that if I’m honest about what I’m thinking most of the time, many people will think I’m a schizophrenic.  I remember when I was first seeing Kent, I asked him what he thought happened to us when we died.  He said, “I think we live on in the memories of the people who loved us,” and I thought “oh shit. “  I figured once he found out that I basically think I’m in communication with the dead, that there are signs of the other side around us everywhere we look, he’d head for the highway.  But he didn’t.  He accepted my spiritual credulity – some people would call it gullibility -- and perhaps leaned in all the closer because of it.  The truth was a risk, but it was better than the alternative -- keeping an essential part of myself a secret from someone I loved.

       In the end I showed up at church on the appointed day to tell about my spiritual journey and decided in the moments before I started to speak to just go ahead and leave it all in.  Or as much of it as would fit in an hour.  And before I was even through I realized that, on top of the feeling of liberation I experienced that day, the truth made for a good story. 

       Ever since then, I’d been turning it over in my head.  Feeling a little sheepish that my response to my lack of success as a writer has been to jump genres -- couldn’t get the novel published so I decided to write a play -- couldn’t get the play produced so I started writing songs and turned the novel into a screenplay.  Knowing that it’s beginning to look like the problem is not with the genre.  In spite of that, I’d been thinking about writing a memoir piece which is what Kent meant when he said I should stop writing fiction.  He meant I should start writing non-fiction instead.  He was telling me to do exactly what I wanted to do.  It was like having my conscience speak out loud.  And saying what I wanted to hear.

        It was a Thursday – five days almost to the minute since my mother had died.  Kent and I had left Roby at 4:45 a.m. that morning so that we could make the five-hour drive back to Austin and get to work by 10 in the morning.  We should’ve left the night before.  We were supposed to leave then.  We both had Thursday classes to teach.  Neither of us could afford to miss another day.  But I couldn’t bear to go.   Couldn’t tear myself away from Roby as the sun set on the day I buried my mother.  The thought of driving away was just unbearable.  I wanted to be in touching distance of my brothers and my father who were staying until the next day.  And I wanted to be in Roby, which, in spite of the fact that it is all but dried up and blown away, barely able to limp into the 21^st century, still has a powerful grip on me.  So Nick and Helen left in Nick’s car for Austin on Wednesday evening, and Kent stayed with me to go drive around the dirt roads of Fisher County with my brother and cousins and a cooler full of beer.   To give me one more night breathing air that smells like home.   It was a burden to him, and Helen would’ve stayed with me and let Kent drive home with Nick, but Kent wanted to be the one who came home with me.   And I was grateful that he did.

       Earlier in the day right after the graveside service for my mother we had gathered at my Aunt Sandra’s house which sits exactly on the spot where Dad and Granny (my great grandparents) had raised their children and some of their grandchildren, including my mother.  Some of us sat on the porch looking out at that northern view toward the Double Mountains that my mother had grown up looking at.  Others sat at the table in the house drinking iced tea.  Others clustered around the tailgate of my cousin’s pick up out behind the house.  We were all telling stories we've told and re-told hundreds of times.  Stories about how the dog -- Keno -- used to chase my father when he’d come to pick my mother up for date.  How once when they were children, Richard left my Aunt Sandra trapped down in a well hole she couldn’t get out of and went home to eat lunch, not sending anyone to help her out until after he’d eaten.   How Granny had thrown a basin of dishwater on my mother when the swing broke and she was knocked unconscious in the fall – baby J. Neal who was sitting in her lap at the time safely cushioned by her body from injury.  How my great grandfather, Dad, had worn his khaki shirt buttoned to the top button every single day no matter the temperature.   How he had ridiculed the space program and the ambition to land on the moon.  “The good Lord just put it up there for a night light, “ Dad, who was born in 1871,  used to say.  We talked about Dad’s father, a Confederate Army draft dodger, who ran with an outlaw named Quantrell and was ultimately hung for murder.   How Dad and Granny, pillars of the community and the Roby Church of Christ, had concealed that part of their history from all their children and grandchildren.  The family didn’t know about it until the 1980s when my mother and aunt, doing genealogy research, made contact with a distant cousin from Longview who assumed that they had grown up knowing the whole story and sent newspaper clippings about the trial and the hanging along with the research she’d completed on the family origins.   My mother went all the way to Union Parish Louisiana to piece together a story that she realized immediately had haunted her grandparents – who had raised her -- and colored her own childhood.  And to confirm what we all already knew – that we are not only a family of storytellers, we are also a family of secret-keepers.   And oddly the stories are more fascinating because of the things we don't or can't tell – the memories we put into words are only the exposed part of something bigger and more complicated and often forbidden.

      The stories we told around the tailgate that day are what inspired Kent to advise me to give up fiction and take up the truth.  On the way home from Roby that morning after my mother’s funeral, we talked about what I could write in the way of a memoir.  Kent loved to brainstorm about future work and career paths.  Our children's, mine, his.  I’d been thinking about writing a piece called “My Dog, My Cat, My Mother, My Father.” Those were the four deaths I knew I was going to experience in a year.  Our dog, Moon, had died the previous August; the cat followed him in February.  Though my father was still alive, it was clear that he was not long for this world.  He was weak and getting weaker after a year and a half of battling mesothelioma.  I thought I could weave a chronological story of those deaths and my mother's in with flashbacks to JB’s death 19 years earlier.  It would be reflections on those people and pets and their legacies. Reflections on what I’d learned from death.  From grief.  Kent suggested weaving songs into it.  I’d already written songs about my father, my mother, and our cat Romeo.  That was a stretch, but Kent believed in exploring all the possibilities and got really excited by trying things that stretched the limits.   Ultimately we were talking about a performance piece that would weave memoir and song together.  Writing that right now I think – that’s crazy.  But riding in the car with Kent that morning, it seemed like a great idea.  An exciting possibility.  

      Of course, the obvious irony is the death I didn’t know about.  I felt even in the first moments after I found out that Kent was dead that I was being punished for having the arrogance to think I could process death so neatly.  As if I had said to the universe – this hurts, but I can take it; I can even turn it into something -- I'll write something clever and good about it; hell, I can even start turning it into something before it’s all over -- before they're all dead.  I still feel the regret almost physically. I repent thinking that I had a handle on death and grief.  

      I don’t think that anymore.  I do still think, though, that there are signs of the other side around me, everywhere I look.  I still believe that the dead watch over me and love me.  As I love them.  That they are pointing me toward a path that I couldn't find on my own.  Since I decided to start a blog, I think that Kent was pointing me in exactly this direction when he told me that morning in Cross Plains that I should stop writing fiction.   Fifteen days before he died.  Fifteen days before my life became even more dramatic than we could imagine.  Fifteen days before he would begin to live on in the memory of those who love him.  Before I would start seeing signs of him everywhere I look.  Sometimes it seems to me as though I began seeing signs of him even before he died.   As though words he spoke to me when he was still alive were only the exposed part of something bigger and more complicated. 

Early Signs

My Aunt Sandra’s response to the last post about Larry McMurtry marrying Ken Kesey's widow:

“How many hours have we spent talking about these books.  Cliff and I laugh about the time we all selected the cast for Lonesome Dove long before a movie was discussed.   One of my favorite memories or story is being in California, so home sick, and happening upon Moving On laying open on a table in the library.  It started in Merkel and that was like seeing someone from home.”

I don’t want to write a blog about Larry McMurtry so I’ve resisted the following post.  But  for now, a little more about how McMurtry has been a sign of something for me.

Early Signs

I think many people who know me may not know that I’ve been married three times.  They missed my first marriage because it was short – 2 years – and so long ago – I was 19 when I married.  I consider it the worse mistake of my life.  Stuart may have considered it the worse mistake of his, too.  I don’t know.  He did say to me in a raging argument near the end, “I suppose if you hadn’t ruined my life, someone else would have.”  Whether I was what ruined his life or not, it seems true enough that Stuart’s life was ruined.  The smartest person I’ve ever known – Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in chemistry and math, college graduate at 20, mensa, voracious reader, out-of-the-ballpark (not just out-of-the-box) critical thinker, more destined to be a Congressman than Michael Corleone -- he was driving a cab for a living when he died at the age of 48. 

A month or so after he died while I was visiting my parents in Roby -- the tiny west Texas town Stuart and I were both from -- I ran into Stuart’s brother at a high school football game.  Although I hadn’t seen Stuart in more than two decades, I sometimes ran into his brother Steve (who, unlike Stuart, had lived up to his father’s expectations) in the capitol.  That night when I found myself behind Steve in line at the concession stand, I told him how sorry I was that Stuart had died.  “Well, Christy,” he said, “we were all just so glad it was of natural causes.”  Steve had clearly long since grown tired of Stuart’s drug use and complementary shennagins.  And although the response sounds cold (and was), I understood.  And Steve knew I understood.  The first thing that had occurred to me when I learned of Stuart’s death was that it must be drug-related.  Even after I read the obituary which said that his heart had failed, or something equally abstract, I assumed that he had taken one too many hits of speed.  Either one too many that night or maybe just one too many for a lifetime. 

Stuart was five years older than me.  That doesn’t seem like much now, but when I was an 18-year-old freshman in college, it seemed huge.  He had been out of college for three years working in California.  For Lockheed.  That was his draft deferment – a job with Lockheed.  On top of being older, he had shoulder length hair which, in 1970, was one of the most admirable qualities I could think of in a man. 

I was actually at his brother, Steve’s, apartment with another boy from Roby -- Brent -- when I met Stuart.  Brent was visiting Austin from Texas Tech for the weekend and had spent the night before trying to convince me to view the fact that I’d missed curfew and couldn’t get into the dorm as an opportunity to have sex with him.  I was ambivalent about my virginity, but I was also ambivalent about Brent, so I had stuck to my guns.  I had lost many of my clothes, though, by morning when Steve burst in only pausing to knock before he opened the door.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’m pretty sure Steve was irritated that Brent and I had occupied his bed all night.  He was willing to welcome Brent as a houseguest, but I think by morning he was resentful of having to spend the night on the couch in his own apartment.  So he came in while Brent and I were still wrestling in bed and brought his brother, Stuart, with him.  While I pulled the covers up around me and Brent groaned at the intrusion, Steve introduced me to Stuart who had just driven in from California for a visit. I knew of Stuart because we were all from Roby.  Even though my family had moved away, I had gone to part of elementary school there and had returned every holiday and long weekend since. We never took a vacation.  We just went back to Roby.  I spent weeks every summer there which is how I came to know Steve and date Brent.  But Stuart was older.  We had never crossed paths.

I’ve had 40 years to analyze why I married Stuart.  I’m still not sure I have an answer. I liked him.  I thought he was smart.  And I admired him.  It’s hard to believe that I thought that was enough, but I guess I did.  I didn't realize it in any articulate way at the time, but I have to admit now that getting married served a purpose for me.  My parents were pressuring me to move back home with them and go to the University of Houston.  And I didn’t want to.  I wanted to be independent.  But I didn’t have the wherewithal or confidence to accomplish that.  Also it turned out that Stuart was crazy about me.  Turned out later that he was crazy period, but that never really undid how charmed I was by his admiration.

After I was saved from the another round between the sheets with Brent by Steve’s exasperation, we all went out together to walk around Austin, run errands.  I’m not sure what our mission was.  Stuart had graduated from UT several years earlier so we might have just been scouting around to see which of his old haunts still existed.  Even then Stuart was nostalgic for the past.  Whatever we were doing we ended up – Stuart, Steve, Brent, and me -  at a little bookstore near campus.  Grackle Books.  It was across from Les Amis on 24^th Street and it sold used books.  I didn’t know it then, but I came to find out that Stuart was enthralled by books and knew more about more kinds of books than anyone I had ever met.  He was an encyclopedia.  And extremely opinionated.  People he liked, he put on a pedestal.  People he didn’t like, he ridiculed and disdained remorselessly.  He knew of writers -- and musicians and film makers, too --  I’d never heard of.  His tastes were remarkably eclectic.  He loved low art as much as high art  -- more, actually -- and didn’t give a flip what other people thought was good or bad.  Still to this day, people will mention to me a writer or musician that I haven’t heard of since I was married to Stuart who is just now gaining recognition.  He introduced me to John Rechy, Harlan Ellison, Vance Bourjaily, James Hilton, William Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Waylon Jennings, the Grateful Dead, Tommy Dorsey, Art Tatum, Russ Meyer, Ken Russell, Robert Downey (Sr.), Truffaut, Bergman, Louis Malle, Roger Korman.  He shaped my tastes and loves in art more than anything in my life, including graduate school.  And he started that first day in Grackle Books when he found a used copy of Leaving Cheyenne.  He snatched it off the shelf like it was a jewel and gave it to me on the spot.  He told me he was buying it for me.  That I had to read it.  That I would love it.  That it was great.  He was unequivocal.  He was certain that he was giving me something precious. 

In spite of his predictions I was completely unprepared for the pleasure I would take in that book.  I loved it so much that I gave it to my mother with the same enthusiasm Stuart had when he gave it to me.  She loved it as much as I did and gave it to her mother.  The last time I saw that copy of Leaving Cheyenne was at my great-Aunt Ola’s house in Roby.  It was sitting on the kitchen table held together by a rubber band – no longer a bound book, just a collection of loose pages.  Aunt Ola had just finished it and was going to pass it on to her daughter.  Meanwhile, my Aunt Sandra, off in California, was pausing to look at a book lying open on a table in a library in San Jose. 

For all of us, Stuart included, reading McMurtry was a breakthrough.  We were all readers.  We all loved books.  But we had never read about people like us.  Except maybe as caricatures or sidekicks.  McMurtry was writing about characters who might easily have been us – or in the case of Leaving Cheyenne  – our grandparents.  Texans.  Drawling rednecks.  Farmers and ranchers.  People who had tried to scratch a living and a life worth living out of the dirt.  People who went to the rodeo all three nights in August come hell or high water (which was not likely): who never missed a highschool football or basketball game; who could do the Cotton-eyed Joe and the Schottische; who had experienced first hand how hard the Church of Christ could be; who knew where the bootlegger lived, which old man molested little girls, which ones kicked their dog, and who could keep a secret.  Larry McMurtry was telling our stories.  And he did it with humor and compassion.  Honest and gentle at the same time.  Exactly the way we’d want our stories told. 

Leaving Cheyenne was out of print in 1970 when Stuart found that copy in Grackle Books.  Even when The Last Picture Show came out two years later, Leaving Cheyenne was not re-issued.  It was almost a decade before I could get a new copy of the book.  I’ve seen Larry McMurtry speak several times, but the only time I’ve ever actually spoken to him was on my 24^th birthday.  It had been three years since Stuart and I had split up.  I was visiting my friend Rusty in Washington D.C. and what I wanted for my birthday was a copy of Leaving Cheyenne.  I thought maybe Larry McMurtry would have one.  So we went to McMurtry’s bookstore in Georgetown.  When we got there Larry McMurty himself was coming out of the door.  I don’t remember what we said to him – I was star-struck -- but I remember what he said to us: “We’re closed.”  I protested, said it was my birthday or something, and he repeated, “We’re closed,” as he turned the key in the lock. Very curmudgeonly.  I don’t think I told him that I wanted a copy of Leaving Cheyenne.  I’m too shy that way – the way where you say what you want.  Still to this day.  So I had to wait another few years before I could read Leaving Cheyenne again and find out it was as good as I had remembered.

And years more than that before I began to be able to even try to make sense out of my marriage to Stuart.  I really can't say that I've made much progress on that path.  It still troubles and confuses me.  But sometimes when someone asks me about my first marriage I say that I married Stuart because he gave me a copy of Leaving Cheyenne on the day I met him.