Della With The Blue Dress On

I am sure she is still out there somewhere, rotating around some distant sun. All five-foot-nothing of her, straight brown hair almost down to her waist. Just a freaky little girl, a hippie chick, really . . . seems like she was always wearing a sleeveless blue denim dress that came down to her knees, and a pair of white Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the kind with wooden soles.

That is how I remember her, anyway; in those Dr. Scholl’s. She had great legs, did I mention that? Terrific legs. Not long, but a nice shape and slender, muscled calves. Calves, mmmmm…

Baby, let me follow you down
Baby, let me follow you down
Well, I’ll do anything in this God Almighty world
If you just let me follow you down

Can I come home with you?
Baby, can I come home with you?
Yes, I’ll do anything in this God Almighty world
If you just let me come home with you

One day in an Abnormal Psychology class the professor was lecturing about something or another – Carl Rogers, I think – but my mind was wandering. I was pondering the Eternal Question, for one thing: Does the study of abnormal psychology screw people up? Or are already screwed up people drawn to the study of abnormal psychology?

Don’t ask me, I was taking it as an elective. Anyway, it was during this daydream that I spotted a girl, or rather the legs of a girl, the next row over to the right of me, about three seats up. There were maybe 10 girls in that class, out of 25 or so students overall, and in the first few weeks none of them drew my particular attention. Including this girl, at least not initially. Turns out she was quite pretty, I just didn’t see it at first.

But I was interested in her once I did see it. Over the next few weeks, I made it a point to fall in line with her walking out after class, and we began to talk. I found out that her name was Della, and that she was from somewhere or another. I cannot say what she thought about me at first. I found, on closer inspection, that I was attracted to her physically; but even more than that, she seemed to be a little off-kilter, a little skewed in her view of things. That was what really got me interested in her.

We ended up dating for awhile, this girl Della and I. On the fourth or fifth time we found ourselves walking and talking together after our Psych class, she asked me if I wanted to go to her apartment. I said that yes, I did, very much; and so we walked across a big open field on the edge of the campus to get to her place, which was in a one-story former Protestant church of some sort, right on University Drive. Someone had bought the building and had divided it evenly into six sections, put up some walls, and voila!, six apartments. Nothing much else was altered from the former church’s configuration – the steeple was still on it and everything. This made for some interesting apartments. Like all the others, Della’s was long and narrow, a lateral cross-section of the old church’s interior. She was located in the former nave, and had a couple of windows. Some of the apartments did not have any.

Anyway, that day after class we went to her place. She didn’t have a television, which in those days was not unusual. We sat on this divan/daybed thing she had in there – the apartment was basically one big room – and we talked and talked, about whatever came into our heads.

After awhile, Della got up and walked over to a small desk, reached around behind the drawers on one side of it, and retrieved a Tupperware container. She came back and sat down next to me, pulled the lid off of the Tupperware, and handed me the container. Inside was some brownish/greenish looking weed, some rolling papers, and also some accessories – a couple of alligator clips, and one of those stoner things, a small ceramic disc with a hole drilled through it. You put the joint in one end, held the disc, and smoked the weed through the hole on the other side. Kept you from burning your fingers.

I never was very good at rolling free hand – I couldn’t get the paper tight enough, or if I did, I’d usually torn it somewhere by then. So I took a $5 bill out of my wallet, folded it in half short-ways, and set a similarly folded rolling paper down into the crease in the folded bill. I dropped in a decent amount of weed – good weed, too, not many stems, and a lot broken up of flower tops – and then using both thumbs and forefingers on the outside of the bill, I rolled the nicest, tightest joint you’d ever want to see. I separated it from the fiver, licked the gummed outer edge of the paper and adhered it to the side of the cigarette, and we were all set.

Della fired my creation up with one of those long butane lighters you light candles and campfires with, and we passed the smoldering blunt back and forth in silence for awhile. About halfway through, Della wet her thumb and forefinger with her saliva and put the joint out. She put it back into the container with the rest of the weed. Then we both sank back into the sofa. I felt light-headed, but pleasant. It was kind of a weird high, actually; and much later I wondered if maybe that weed hadn’t been ‘enhanced’ with something. Though at the time, it did not occur to me.

After some moments of cannabis-induced introspection and silence, I came out of the fog a little, and looked over at Della, who was looking at me. We passed a few more silent minutes like that, then she calmly sat upright, and slowly pulled her long-sleeved sweater clear of her sizeable breasts, up over her head, and off. No bra, of course. She looked at me kind of sideways and gave me the sweetest smile. I was still just sitting there, gazing at her. I was in a state of awe. She was just gorgeous.

It was one of those magic moments that is so hard to explain later on. The weed had something to do with it, of course; but it was mostly the combination of her good looks, her quirky but pleasant personality, my own image of myself at that time and how it fit in with this pretty girl, and so on. She was sitting next to me on that divan, in all her beautiful, half-naked glory, and it was too much for me. I had trouble taking it all in, I had to look away. The positive energy and good feeling was coming at me in such volume and quantity that I could hardly process it. I looked over again. Della in silhouette had a kind of pale glow around her – it was like a halo, except it was around her whole body, not just her head.

For a brief moment I felt like I saw all the way through Della. For just a second I thought I knew everything about her there was to know. What I saw might not have been appealing to a thousand other guys, but to me, at that moment, she seemed nearly perfect. Flawless. I was convinced it was no accident that I had stumbled into an encounter with this beautiful girl; it wasn’t just a random convergence of events that caused me to now be sitting next to her on her sofa, staring at her terrific looking breasts and areolae, while she undid her blue jeans and bent forward slowly and slid them down her legs. It was that day I had one of my first inklings that there was a plan out there somewhere with my name on it, already written; and that while some aspects of that plan were pretty hard for me to take, there were also rewards like this moment, which made it all worthwhile. All of it. And then some.

It wasn’t fair to this sweet girl, and it sounds crazy in the retelling, even to me. But looking at the nearly naked Della that afternoon, I had the strongest feeling that I was really looking at God, or at some aspect of Him, or at some manifestation of His love for me, or at some manifestation of His love, period. Like I said, it sounds crazy. I was sitting there next to Della on that sofa/daybed thing, nearly going out of my head with what I guess is called ecstasy . . . ecstasy, in the truest sense. It was too much of a good thing. I needed her to bring me back down, to get my mind and body back into line.

My vision of blessed holy loveliness was down to just a pair of peach-colored cotton panties by then. She sat back down next to me, as close as she could get, and then she put her arms around me, and she kissed me, ever so gently. It wasn’t a frantic, tongue-thrashing, purely lust-driven kiss. It was languid, and soft, and slow. On the lips, a little wet and almost sloppy. But actually, it was perfect. Della had maneuvered around all the painstakingly constructed bullshit I surrounded myself with, and had gone straight to the tender heart of me, just like that. How she knew how to do it is a great mystery, among so many other great mysteries. But she did.

At that point, after that kiss, I simply melted into her.

We made love that day for hours and hours – slowly, almost lazily – on that couch, or whatever it was. It seemed like it went on forever. The weed had entirely destroyed my sense of time, but I knew for a fact our Psych class had ended at 1:30 p.m. that afternoon. By the time Della and I had finally run out of steam, so to speak, it was nearly dark outside.

I was totally drained, and it took me a little while to get myself together long enough to pull on some clothes. Then for whatever reason I decided to walk around and straighten up Della’s place a little. She was drained, too, and I told her to stay put there on the divan while I picked up. She was lying on her stomach, and I noticed it wasn’t just the front of her that was powerfully appealing. I hated to do it, but I pulled out a comforter and covered her. She’d said she was cold.

Della tried hard to stay awake for me. I put everything we’d got out back where I thought it went. Then I went over and knelt down next to the daybed/divan, like I was going to pray, maybe. I put my hand on Della’s back near her shoulders, between her deltoid muscles, and I caressed her a bit. Then I kissed her gently on the forehead and then on the lips, lightly. With that, I coerced a little smile out of her, which is what I was going for. I told her good night, and kissed her again; then I gathered up my stuff and let myself out. She had fought herself to stay awake until I left, bless her, but I had no doubt she was asleep even before I turned the lock on her front door and walked out and pulled it shut behind me. The thought of her sleeping gently there on her daybed, still naked under the comforter I had placed over her, made me feel so warm inside.


I want to live with a Cinnamon Girl
I could be happy the rest of my life
With a Cinnamon Girl

A dreamer of pictures, I run in the night
You see us together chasing the moonlight
My Cinnamon Girl


Love is just a kiss away, the song said. And so it was, to my surprise. My experience had been that love was often hard to find, real love. And hard to fall into. But what I learned from Della is that sometimes it was easy. Especially if I wasn’t trying to fall in love, especially if falling in love was about the last thing on my mind.

I also realized, not for the first time and not for the last time, that being in love – whatever drawbacks that might have – is infinitely preferable to not being in love. I learned that the message that is out there everywhere, is out there for a good reason. The message that God loves me, that God Is Love. He told us we were put here to love one another. We can love one another on many levels; but whatever the level, the operative phrase is always the same: Love. One. Another.

I had a long walk back to my car that evening. From Della’s apartment, just off the northern boundary of the campus, to the auxiliary parking lot on the other side of MLK, on the extreme south side, was a mile, at least. The evening was pleasant, though. It was spring, and near dusk. The temperature was moderate, and there was a light breeze.

As I walked along back to my car, I was walking on air, almost. I felt so exhilarated. I knew I sometimes treated meeting a terrific woman as a religious experience, practically. That may have been wrong, wrong, wrong in a theological sense, but I was pretty simple, I didn’t know any better. I knew I was incapable of being ‘saved’, in the sense that some people meant. I thought it was silly, a mental trick one played on oneself, to believe one could be “born again.” You are born once, you only get the one chance. It was not to say one was irredeemable, or even that one could not be saved. But it was all part of one life, all of it – the good, the bad, and the indifferent.

And you took your saviors however and whenever they came. As I climbed the steps up to the pedestrian walkway that ran high above MLK Parkway and came down in the parking lots on the other side, I thought again of Della. Sweet, naked Della, lying there on her couch with the halo glowing all around her. Being with her that day, opening myself up to her more completely than I ever would have to a confessor, . . . being with Della that day had freed me from something. Something I was not even aware of and that I am not sure about, even now. All I know is being with Della lifted something off of me that was palpable. I felt lighter, literally and in spirit, because of who Della was, what she was, what she looked like. And because of the unlikely but doubtless fact that she looked upon me kindly, and would occasionally grace me with a beatific smile. I came to realize the thing that was lifted off of me, whatever it was, was malevolent in nature. It would have eventually pulled me down and maybe under. But Della had saved me from that.

Della saved me. No way around it, I had been saved.

I stood in the middle of the walkway above MLK. It was dark by then, and I looked west down the busy thoroughfare, at all the headlights from the traffic. People were commuting home. The long line of lights moved slowly, snake-like, in long, gentle curves. From the west unto the east.

The evening breeze blew through my long-ish hair as I threw my books into the back seat of the Jeep. Just before climbing in, I turned around to face north, and I blew a kiss. My only hope was that the gentle breeze that had blown through my hair would carry my expression of love, back across the campus and the open land, back to the one it was meant for. Back to the intended receptacle for my expressions of love. The one who lay gently then, in angelic sleep.

Back to my baby.

_______________________________________

Into The Sea, Eventually

The beach is so weird to me now. The landscape has literally been transformed. The Bolivar Peninsula is really just a big sand bar; big enough that your normal everyday weather doesn’t affect it all that much. What Hurricane Ike did was move the whole fucking peninsula around. It eroded some beaches and built up others. Tons and tons of sand washed up onto the land and settled. One of the first things you notice is there is very little green anywhere. All the open marshland as well as the carefully cultivated lawns in the subdivisions are now covered with sand. The sand dunes that used to run from High Island all the way down nearly to Point Bolivar are entirely gone. You can see the Gulf from anywhere on the peninsula now, which I actually kind of like. By the same token, I was looking out the north-facing windows of the cabin yesterday, one of the relatively few cabins that survived intact, and I realized that the tugboat and barges that appeared to be moving magically across the landscape were actually sailing up the Intracoastal. I’d never been able to see the ship canal from the beach side of the highway before. I’ve been coming down here all my life, and now it is hard to recognize anything. People have told me with all the landmarks washed away, they could not find their own property after the storm. It was just one giant sand pile. They were using old surveys and GPS to find the buried roads and streets. The whole effect of this lack of almost any significant landmark is kind of surreal.

Actually, though, I am amazed at how much has come back down here already, and there are numerous signs that the recovery effort is ongoing. There is heavy equipment everywhere, mostly Galveston County crews rebuilding the beaches. When I saw it a couple of weeks after the storm came through, I did not think Bolivar would ever be habitable again. But it is slowly coming back. Until the next storm comes through, anyway.

A couple of evenings ago me and the beagle were taking a walk down the beach, just before sundown. He was having a great time, sniffing out who knows what and running off in every different direction at once. He chased wading birds, and dug up a pair of bikini bottoms and brought them to me (I have no idea.) He is a pretty dog, all beagle but a mix between the standard breed, and a “lemon” beagle on his mother’s side. He is almost all white, with just a patch here and there of brown and black. He looks like a show dog, but he is not. What he is, is wild as hell. And he can pretty much run free down here (unlike in town), and he was enjoying our walk very much, and I was happy for him.

While the dog was doing his thing, the man was walking along, alternately staring out to sea and at the horizon and the setting sun, and looking ahead at miles and miles of empty beach before us. What a gorgeous scene, I was thinking. I was looking down, too, trying to avoid stepping on anything really sharp. This part of the beach, near Gilchrist, has always had a lot more shell than the rest of the beach down here, I don’t know why. As I looked down at millions of fragments of broken up seashells, it occurred to me that what really defined this picture postcard scene more than anything else, was death. Death loomed everywhere. In the broken shells, on the empty beach. Looking inland at the barren landscape that used to be full of beach houses and people drinking and laughing and barbecuing and shooting off fireworks. All gone. There were dead bodies, too. Most of those were found with everything else that used to be on this peninsula, washed up on the far shore of Trinity Bay, in southern Chambers County. There are many more, I am told, that have yet to be found.

I’d like to be really dramatic and say part of me died in that storm, too; but that would not be accurate. I am sorry for what happened down here, sorry for everyone’s losses, but I find myself strangely unmoved by the complete leveling of a place I spent so many happy hours, from childhood up to last summer. It just doesn’t bother me as much as I thought it would. It is still the beach, after all. Despite all the hell-raising and womanizing and surfing and whatever else I did down here for all those years, the truth is that all that ever really mattered to me was the beach itself, the wide stretch of smooth sand and then the ocean. That part is still here.

My life went where it went, but I always, always had the beach in the back of my mind. I still do. Just the physical act of sitting or walking on the sand and looking out to the gulf is so powerful. I can sit out there for hours and just stare at the horizon, listening to the surf. I took up surf fishing several years ago, not because I am such a fanatic about catching fish, but rather so I would have a cover when I wanted to come down here and just meditate. A guy sitting on the beach for hours staring out to sea with a fishing pole in his hands is one thing; a guy just sitting there all day looks a little weird after awhile.

But just looking was never really good enough for me, either. I was never more than a half-ass surfer, but I really didn’t care. I just liked the feeling of riding on a wave, the accompanying lifestyle, and the fact the pursuit caused me to spend every available moment on the beach, with people as inspired and crazy as I was.

But even more than surfing, my favorite thing of all is to swim in the surf, at night and preferably alone.

++++++++++

I picked up the somewhat dangerous habit of swimming in the ocean at night when I was 12 years old. My scout troop was camping out at Gilchrist, not far from Rollover Pass. That was probably the best campout I ever went on. The surf was really rough that weekend, and we body-surfed all day long. Then at night, we sat around the bonfire we’d made from driftwood, and listened to our scoutmaster (who was a pervert, we later found out) tell stories that were either supposed to be funny or scary, I forget which. That got boring pretty quickly, and me and a friend of mine slipped away in the darkness and went down to the water’s edge. I wanted to go swimming, but he was too scared to. So I went by myself.

I have always been a strong swimmer. Not for speed – I never swam competitively – but I could swim all day and never get tired. And I had no fear. That spring, in order to qualify for Second Class scout, I’d participated in a mile swim. They would take all the boys to a spot on the Neches River, above Collier’s Ferry on the Jefferson County side, and we were to swim from there a mile downstream, to a pick up point on the far bank of the river, in Orange County.

A mile sounds like a long way, but actually it was a pretty easy trip. In the springtime the current in the Neches is pretty strong, from runoff upstream, and one can almost float a mile as fast as swim it. In fact, the toughest part of the mile swim was getting across the river to the opposite bank before passing up the pick up point. That current was strong. . . you’d be in the water and see big cedar logs passing you up, and sometimes a drowned dog, or a water moccasin. . . it is a wonder no kids drowned. I doubt seriously the mile swim is still conducted in this manner.

++++++++++

Anyway, that night at the beach I swam out into the surf alone, and it was the most incredible feeling of freedom and loneliness, I’ll never forget it. I was hooked. Since then, I have gone swimming in the ocean almost every chance I got. I like swimming at night especially, because no one knows you are out there. You are on your own. If you get fatigued and start going under, no one is going to save you. You’re fucked. On the other hand, knowing no one is watching over you, being your ‘lifeguard’, is part of the allure. People say, “I’m all alone,” all the time. But when you are out in the water by yourself at night, so far out the lights on the horizon from the beach highway are just tiny dots, you know you really are all alone.

I read a story once about Clint Eastwood. In his early 20′s he was in the military reserves, and one night he and another guy were flying from Alaska, I think, down the Pacific coastline to somewhere in California. About 2 miles offshore in northern California their plane shut down, and they ditched in the surf. The plane sank quickly, and Eastwood and his buddy realized if they were to live, they’d have to swim 2+ miles at night, through the cold and rough Pacific, to the California shoreline. So that is what they did.

That story is just incredible to me. At that point Eastwood hadn’t even begun acting yet. He had his whole fabulous career and life ahead of him. But I am guessing he probably had his life-defining moment out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that night, when he was barely twenty years old. It had to seem like it was all downhill from there.

++++++++++

I really got into night time surf-swimming in earnest in my twenties, and have continued up to today. I’ll just disappear for a couple of hours, no one knows. Usually, when I get to the water’s edge, I swim straight out against the surf for 750 to 1000 yards. Depending on the tides, that is past the third sandbar, the water is probably 25-30 feet deep. That is a tiring swim, so once I am out there I float for a little while and rest; then once I’m rested I swim parallel to the shoreline for a mile or so, then head on back in.

And that is it, really. A friend once told me that at dusk and just after is when sharks like to look for dinner. I hadn’t known that, but I will occasionally feel a sand shark ramming into the side of my leg with it’s snout. That is startling, and it scares the hell out of you, which is why they do it, I think. Sometimes I’ll come back in criss-crossed with welts from jellyfish; though I’ll admit that they usually look a lot worse than they really are. Mostly it is just stings from cabbage-heads, which itch more than hurt.

I’ve been asked, Why? Almost immediately I will think . . . If you ask why, you’ve really asked and answered the question. Why? Because it makes me feel free. Because it makes me feel all alone. In short, why the hell not? I could - in theory, I guess - get swallowed whole out there by the biggest sand shark in recorded history, there one minute, gone the next. Or I could huddle in the safety of my beach cabin, safe from a seemingly unthreatening hurricane that seemed unthreatening right up until the moment the giant dome of water it was pushing ahead of it suddenly showed up on my doorstep, and washed me away like so much flotsam and jetsam; only to have me wash up days later mangled and tangled up in a bunch of trash and debris on the shoreline of a remote marsh in southern Chambers County, where I might not be found for years and years, if ever.

Given that choice, I’ll take my chances swimming with the sharks.

______________________________

Sally Can't Dance

“So, how does it feel, being in a wheelchair?”

“What?”

“How does it feel – you know – to be stuck in that thing, like, forever?”

The young reporter was nervous, and cleared his throat. His editor had sent him out to do a story of human interest, to find one of the handicapped students at his school and ask them stupid questions like, you know, how does it feel to be in a wheelchair?

That young reporter was me, by the way, working earnestly for my high school newspaper, Populi Verbum. I had taken Journalism I my junior year on a whim. I needed an elective to fill out my schedule, and I’d already taken Home Ec (twice) and Bachelor Living and the blow-off classes like that, and my girlfriend wanted to take Journalism, so I did, too.

It worked out pretty well, actually. Normally the J-I students stayed out of the way when the paper was being readied for a printing (usually every third week or so), while the Journalism II and III students did all the heavy lifting. We were supposed to watch, and learn. But they were short on upper level students that year, and many of the ones they had weren't real sharp. Neither was the editor, a big girl with glasses who thought a gripping opinion piece might focus on the pros and cons of students picking up after themselves in the cafeteria. They’d had a music column the year before, and a pretty good one, but the guy who wrote it had graduated. Since I was the only one in any of the classes who exhibited a broad knowledge of the current popular music and was willing to do it, I got the music column gig. Quite a big deal, I thought, though the J-II and III students looked down on it, because it wasn’t “real” reporting.

That is how I ended up out in the field asking dumb and offensive questions of my ‘physically challenged’ classmates. The editor thought that even though my music column was popular with the readers, I needed to get out and get some “real” reporting experience. Right. I ended up not completing that assignment, and figured I’d lose my column to boot, but fuck her, I wasn’t asking any more questions like that. Anyway, as it happened I got to keep the column – usually two or three short reviews of current LP releases – and no one ever asked me to do any “real” reporting again. Sweet.

The other nice thing about that class was I was the oldest student in it, and one of only two guys. The rest were 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls, a lot of them attractive 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girls. Of course I couldn’t do anything about that, since my girlfriend was in there with me. She was a 14- and 15-year-old sophomore girl, too, and was friends with a lot of the other girls in that class, so they were usually hanging around her and/or my desk (it was a pretty informal atmosphere.) Truth is, I kind of ended up running that class.

One girl I really liked – as a friend now – was named Sally. She was one of my girlfriend’s friends, and sort of pretty. Yellow hair and a nice smile, in some ways just another slim teen-aged girl dressed in your standard late 1970s attire. What I really liked about Sally was she had an attitude. This 95-lb. girl would get right up in the face of anyone who was fucking with her. No fear. I liked that.

My girlfriend knew something was up right away, of course, and she got on me about it. But I swore this girl Sally was just a friend, which she was, and eventually that other died down. We had a lot of fun in that class. The teacher was only a few years older than us and pretty inexperienced, and she was happy to let us do what we wanted, as long as it didn’t get her in any trouble.

One time we were helping put together the paper for the press run. Back then, before there were computers in the classroom, we had to cut out copies of the stories run off on a mimeograph machine and stick them to these boards the actual size of the newspaper pages. The boards had wax lines on them, and we’d stick the stories to the wax, mixing and matching and moving things around the board until it all fit.

A few of us stayed late to finish, because the boards had to be at the printers by 11:00 that evening, or something like that. By the time we were done it was 8:00 p.m. Sally said she needed a ride, so she and my girlfriend and I got in my ’72 Skylark and I drove us home. I dropped my girlfriend off first because she lived on the other side of the West End, and her mom was already pissed off because we’d stayed as late as we had. I kissed her good night and then Sally slid into my front seat and I headed for her house, only a few streets over from mine.

It was the first time I’d had any kind of conversation with Sally outside of school, with no one else butting in. I asked her some things about her family – I thought I knew one of her brothers – but the whole situation was kind of awkward, and I don’t really know why. Sally was pretty talkative – and sarcastic-funny – in class, but now she was quiet and kind of timid, and I saw her in a different way than I had before. Without the up-front brashness to cover up, she was a pretty scared little girl; but rather than make me think less of her, it made me feel like protecting her and doing whatever I could to make everything all right for her.

And, of course, I couldn’t do that. I had a girlfriend who I was really happy with already, and there was no way I could pull off some kind of svengali/guardian angel thing with Sally platonically, that I knew of. I’d end up falling for her if she didn’t fall for me first, and either way that would have been nothing but trouble.

I don’t think Sally and I were ever as close again as we were that night after I dropped my girlfriend off, the night we sat in her driveway for 15 minutes and said maybe ten words between us, just sitting there in sweet silence. Nothing physical happened – like I said, we hardly even spoke – but I would not have wanted to be anywhere else on the planet that night for those fifteen minutes. I felt like time had slowed down and I had been given the gift of Vision, if only for a few minutes . . the vision to see, to know what everything about everything meant, to see every blip and planet and star on that starry night and know each one and understand the arrangement of it all, including the arrangement of me and this pretty, skinny blonde girl alone together in my car on this odd and random night. She was a friend of mine, but my feelings for her had been changed. I never even touched her, but after that night I thought of her often, though usually from afar. All through high school and after, long after. Way past the time when the girlfriend I valued so much then was long, long gone. When the night was clear and cold, especially, I would think of her. I would think I could smell the smoke from her cigarette, and see her golden hair blowing lightly in the breeze, and hear her next to me, being quiet. One thing she had told me once was that she really liked my hair, it was ‘cool’ . . . what it was, was pretty damn long, and ever since then I have worn my hair longer than I should have, all the way up to now. Because of what Sally said once, if you want to know the truth, in that wonderful, offhand way she said things.

++++++++++

I’d been sitting in the recliner in my living room staring at the ceiling for hours when my wife came in. It was a Saturday, and she’d been out shopping with her friends. We’d been married only a couple of years then, and did most things happily together, but both of us understood that sometimes it was good for her to go shopping or something with her friends, and for me to drink a few cold ones with mine or, as it happened, to sit alone for awhile in the living room, thinking about things from long ago.

That day I’d got a phone call from a guy I used to hang out with some back in the high school days. I hadn’t heard from him in years. His name was Nick, and he always talked like a ‘50s hipster/beatnik for some reason. It wasn’t an affectation as far as I could tell, it was just the way he talked. He reminded me of Sugar Bear – he sounded like him, and kind of looked like him, too – and in fact I used to call him ‘Sugar Bear’ sometimes, back in the old days. Anyway, Nick called to tell me that my old friend Sally had died the night before, they thought from an overdose of prescription drugs. She was 32 years old, twice divorced, and had two young children. And she was still pretty, Nick said. But he said all the old fiestiness had long gone out of her. She’d been through two rough marriages. One guy ended up doing a 10-year stretch in Huntsville, and the other (a guy I knew) was a fucking loser, and left her much worse for the wear. Some of this I had known, but not all of it.

Nick said for the last few years, after her second marriage broke up, Sally had just been kind of lost. She was always an experimenter when it came to controlled substances, a self-medicator. And one night she just medicated herself too much, I guess.

And upon hearing it I remember being sort of overwhelmed for a few minutes by that same feeling I’d had one night so many years before, the feeling of wanting to protect this sweet girl, and to make her smile and be happy. When that feeling passed, I was left kind of disoriented, split between the present and the time before, when things were breezy and easy and nothing mattered all that much, and I could look across a schoolroom desk at a skinny little blue-eyed, yellow-haired girl, and I could say something funny that made those eyes of hers light up, maybe made her laugh out loud. From down deep, where all the joy comes from.

And then I let her go, and I was fully back in the present. I pushed the footrest of the recliner in with my legs, and got up to go help my wife carry things in from her car. It was already fall, and when I walked outside I noticed the coolness in the air. It was going to start getting cold pretty soon, it wouldn’t be long now.

++++++++++

I still don’t know why I was put here, or who sent me, exactly. I’ve long ago forgot what my instructions were, if I ever knew. I feel just right, though; like I am becoming self-actualized or something. God loves me, and apparently Abraham Maslow does, too. As did this golden-haired girl, who was as tough as they come but really wasn’t. Who thought my hair was cool, who loved me like I loved her, with her mind, from afar. And who loves me still, I can literally feel it, from wherever she is out there.

.....