The Oregon Country Fair

The annual Oregon Country Fair is in just a few weeks. If you lived through the ‘60s, this is a chance to go back in time. The Fair happens every July on a piece of land 13 miles outside of Eugene, Oregon, off Highway 126 near the town of Veneta. It’s a huge festival out in the woods that draws 45,000 people, over a 3-day period.
The festival got its start in 1969 to benefit an alternative children’s school and was held in Eugene. Originally called the Oregon Renaissance Fair, in 1976 the name was changed to the Oregon Country Fair. In 1970 it moved to its current location. I arrived in Eugene that fall. The country had dramatically changed while I was away in the Army. There were love-ins and be-ins, black riots in the big cities, assassinations, the riotous ‘68 Democratic Convention in Chicago and Richard Nixon was President. The music had changed too. While I played soldier, the youth were listening to radically different new rock ‘n’ roll groups like The Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, and The Grateful Dead. The Beatles had morphed into Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Buffalo Springfield and Cream had come and gone while I was away and The Animals, The Lovin’ Spoonful and The Yardbirds were gone forever. Timothy Leary advised American youth to “Turn on, tune in and drop out”.  Woodstock and Altamont were over, and journalists were describing the end of the ‘60s counter-culture movement. The party was over, and I had just arrived.
In 1970 right after I was released from the Army, I drove around the west in my brand-new MG. My constant dilemma was whether or not to pick up the long-haired hitchhiker on the side of the road. If it was a young woman, it was a no-brainer. After dropping off one mild-mannered long-haired guy, wrapped in a Mexican serape.  I realized he had taken off with my Seiko watch. I had placed it in front of the gear shift lever to keep track of time and Mr. Love and Peace stole it right out from under my nose. I wondered whether my flashy silver watch would impress the chicks at the commune where he was headed.  I didn’t stop for hitchhikers much after that. Having been indoctrinated by the military and traumatized by war, I viewed these young drifters as undisciplined, self-centered, naive, unrealistic slackers, but I also envied their free spirit and sense of community and belonging.
I enrolled at the Junior college in Eugene for fall quarter. Eugene appeared to have been one of the hubs of counter-culture activity. The remnants were everywhere. In 1972, the Oregon Renaissance Fair featured the Grateful Dead with proceeds going to the Springfield Creamery. That year the Creamery was struggling, so the money from the concert and a subsequent movie called “Sunshine Daydream” helped keep it afloat. The tickets were printed on yogurt labels.

Springfield Oregon is just across the river from Eugene. The Springfield Creamery was started by Chuck and Sue Kesey in 1960. Chuck is Ken Kesey’s brother. Ken was our local famous author and Merry Prankster. He often performed readings at the Fair. The Creamery limped along financially until it found a niche product, Nancy’s Yogurt. An interesting aside; according to the Springfield Creamery website, the sale of Nancy’s Yogurt didn’t take off until it was introduced to the Bay area by an ex-U of O student, Gilbert Rosborne, and his business partner, Huey Lewis, yeah, that Huey Lewis. Huey hadn’t quite made the big-time yet and he and Gil were earning money distributing underground comic books to natural food stores around the country. While passing through the Eugene area, they decided to add Nancy’s Yogurt to their inventory. They filled a rented U-Haul full of the yogurt with lots of bags of ice and hauled it all the way to San Francisco where the yogurt was well received.
In 1978, Katie and I worked in Ritta’s Burritos at the Oregon Country Fair.  Ritta and Katie were friends and worked as nurses’ aides at a local nursing home. I was in graduate school at the time and worked there too on the night shift. I was eager to get to know the cute Asian I’d see when I came on duty. I found out that she helped Ritta at her burrito booth every week at the Eugene Saturday Market. Neither of them knew me, but probably had seen me around the nursing home. For numerous Saturdays, I hung around the Saturday Market and bought a burrito for lunch. It took me quite a few Saturdays and a boat load of burritos before getting up my nerve to ask Katie out. When I finally did, she said yes to having herbal tea with me at Mamma’s Truck Stop.
Soon we were a couple, and I too was working for Ritta in her burrito booth. We helped out one summer at the Oregon Country Fair. Ritta’s booth was extremely popular with a constant line out front, so we didn’t get a chance to see any of the entertainment venues or wander around looking at the various booths. We worked hard and steady all 3 days, but we didn’t mind. We were young and happy, and living in the hippest town in the Pacific Northwest.
The current Oregon Country Fair still manages to capture some of the magic of those times. We went back a few years ago. Ritta’s Burritos was still there with the ever-present crowd in front. As we stood there talking with Ritta, we heard the parade approaching long before it actually passed by. It was winding its way through the labyrinth of pathways. We waited as the drums and cymbals grew closer until at last, the long procession of costumed people, musicians, jugglers, men in underpants and topless women marched and danced by. After the last “Merry Prankster” disappeared around the corner, the dusty air hung heavy with the smell of patchouli and ganja. I noticed the people on the other side of the path, mostly aging boomers like us. They looked grimy, tired and dazed, probably aware that our time had passed, and we had long ago outgrown flower power. But, for a few hours at the Fair, we had all been hypnotized and transported by a groovy psychedelic time warp.

“Midnight in Paris”, Search for the Golden Age

Katie and I went to the movies in the middle of the day on a Monday, one of the many luxuries of retirement. I still get excited when we enter the theater and smell the popcorn, though we rarely eat any. There are few things as satisfying as seeing a good movie on the big screen. At this time of year, the previews of coming attractions are all summer blockbusters. Most of them are action-packed movies relying heavily on special effects. Obviously, these movies are meant to attract the younger crowd. I’m rarely interested in seeing any of them.
We saw “Midnight in Paris” and both really enjoyed it. It is a typical Woody Allen movie. The main character Gil, played by Owen Wilson, one of the best Woody Allen substitutes yet, is a romantic. He is faced with the choice of either trying to live his dream or conforming to the norms and expectations of others. Gil is on vacation with his fiancée and her parents in Paris. He is thrilled to be there, in the very place where many of his heroes gathered back in the twenties. He sees this time in history as the golden age of Paris. He’s always wanted to live and write in Paris, but instead “sold out” to become a Hollywood screenwriter. His fiancée, Inez, gives him little to no support for his romantic vision and her parents, conservative right wing republicans, just don’t like him.  Inez expects Gil to continue on in his secure and lucrative job in Hollywood, but to  Gil this is beginning to feel like a shallow and empty pursuit.
In an attempt to immerse himself in the Paris magic, Gil takes a walk by himself through the city streets. At midnight, he is invited into an old taxi by some party goers who turn out to be Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. The cab transports him back in time to the roaring ‘20s. He does this night after night, meeting and partying with many of his literary and artistic heroes. These famous characters of the time are portrayed stereotypically and humorously through Woody’s eyes. I loved seeing Owen Wilson channeling Woody and conversing with Hemingway, Picasso, Dali, Gertrude Stein and others.
As in many of Woody’s movies, the protagonist struggles with a deeper existential question. After experiencing Paris in the’20s, he  is transported further back in time to another golden age, the turn of the century, and he comes to realize that the romantic vision of another life in another time or place is only that, a romantic vision and nothing more.
Gil had traveled to Paris earlier in his life and realized that he missed an opportunity to experience his dream back then. He doesn’t want to miss it again, and the movie ends with a positive ‘follow your dream’ message. Gil chooses to stay in Paris and write his novel in present time, and begin to live in his own golden age.
For many of us retirees, this is our time to catch up on  missed opportunities. Some will always remain missed, but others can be realized to some degree or other. At this age, life looks different than it did when we were young. So many of the dreams we had were dreams of the young—dreams of becoming something greater than how we perceived  ourselves.  At various times in my life I  dreamed of being a professional baseball player, a rock ‘n’ roll star and a famous writer living  in southern Europe. In retirement I can still keep active physically,  play music and  write, right here where I am. Many retirees like myself are trying to transform  the golden years into the golden age.
I’m having a little trouble letting go of the writer in southern Europe dream.
 

Dealing With Retirement Anxiety

The snowbirds have returned to their homes in the north and we’re entering our second summer in Arizona. It’s the beginning of June and we haven’t hit 100 degrees yet, but we’ve been uncomfortably close several times. There’s a slight feeling of dread as the weather heats up. We know we’ll be stuck indoors much of the time.
The mornings are beautiful, by far the best part of the day. The temperatures are in the high 60s to mid 70s, the birds and bunnies are scurrying around doing their thing and we can sit in the fresh morning air reading and sipping our tea and coffee. If there is anything that needs to be done outside, I know I’d better do it now, because in a few hours it will be too damned hot. But since we live in a condo, there’s really not much that needs doing.
Around 11:00 the day becomes more of a  challenge. We close the windows and doors to capture the coolness, let down the shades to keep out the sun and our cloistered cave-like existence begins. The other day we watched a movie in the middle of the afternoon. I remember as a kid watching TV on hot summer days, but not since then. Now some part of me feels like I’m doing something wrong. Luckily another part overrides it by saying, You’re retired, it’s incredibly hot outside and there’s really nothing you have to do right now. By the time the movie was over, my work ethic anxiety had passed.
My biggest problem with retirement so far is battling the feeling that I should be doing something but I don’t know what.  “Should” is the operative word in that sentence and implies following the rules or doing what is expected of me. But there aren’t many rules in retirement and with only a few exceptions, no one expects me to be doing anything. So that leaves me with the thought, I can do whatever I want, which in turn leads to, Well then, what do I want? This questions drops me into an old familiar place even deeper and darker and more confusing than What should I do?
I remember getting stuck in this place when I was a child. I felt bored a lot during the summer months. I remember my mom asking me “What do you want?” or “What do you feel like doing?” I always had trouble coming up with an answer. My dad’s flippant advice to  me was, “Do something, even if it’s wrong.” Like many of the crazy things he used to say, there was some truth in it. When I would make my best guess and start doing something, sure enough, that feeling of boredom would pass. I made the decision before quitting work that writing would be one of my main activities in retirement, I‘ve tried to stick with that decision, but sometimes I haven’t the foggiest idea what to write about. So using my dad’s advice, I just start by writing something like,“I have no idea what to write about today” and more often than not something starts taking shape.
When I was still in the Army in the late ‘60s, I decided I was going to exercise on a regular basis. I started running around a local track. Soon I discovered that exercise helped me to feel better about myself and my life. It relaxed the anxiety within. I still exercise regularly for the same reasons, but I never feel like exercising. You’d think that after all these years I would, but it’s still a struggle to get started. I have to push through the feeling every time. This reminds me of what Woody Allen said on the subject, something like, ”When I feel the urge to exercise, I lie down until it goes away.” There is truth in this saying too. All things pass in time. So in this year and a half of retirement, I’ve learned that when the boredom becomes too great and when I can’t figure out what I want to do or what I should do, I take a nap.

Retirement, a Time for Being

It was after reading The Magus, by John Fowles, sometime in the late ‘60s, that I started thinking about the difference between being and becoming. In the novel, Nicholas, a young Oxford graduate, accepts a post teaching English on a Greek island. On one of his long solitary walks he runs into an older wealthy man who lives alone on his estate. They begin taking walks together and having long talks. I don’t remember much about the plot, but I do remember that on one of these walks, the older man makes the distinction to Nicholas that because he was young, he was busy becoming, while the older man was simply being.
The desire to become something comes from a place of dissatisfaction. I am dissatisfied with who I am and when I become something different, then I will be happy. People who are successful at their jobs, do the work because they love it. That’s where the satisfaction comes from. It does not come from the identification with or status from the role they play. Becoming is always focused on the future, not the present. It is self- conscious and concerned with how others view us. Adults get caught in the realm of becoming because of an underlying feeling that what they are is not enough.
Being is not future oriented but is totally in the present moment. To become a pianist, one has to spend much time in the being mode, practicing the piano. When one finally becomes an accomplished pianist, it is not the role that gives one happiness, but the act of being an instrument for the music. The pianist loses his/her personal identity in the unselfconscious act of playing music.
Young children more easily allow themselves to just “be in the world”. They also can get lost in the desire of becoming, but I assume this is normal for their developing personalities.
I’ve always liked honeybees. I like them because on one long hot summer day when I was a child, I sat in the back yard and watched the bees come and go on the flowering bushes. I had nothing to do and no one to do it with, so I surrendered to a state of being and to my delight, shared that space with the honey-bees. They went about their business deliberately and meticulously. I felt a oneness with the bees and felt joyously alive. After all these years, the sight of honeybees can instantly transport me into the still spaciousness of being.
The mode of becoming dominated my life after puberty and when I entered junior high school. I felt that I wasn’t enough and needed to work harder to become a better athlete, create a better body, become a better conversationalist and a better student etc. In my fantasies I wanted to be cool, adventurous and fearless. All this angst about becoming something different arose out of a discontented place inside me.
In the mode of becoming, we never quite get there. Even when I did succeed in an area, it still wasn’t good enough. We’re only satisfied when we are in the realm of being. When we surrender to being, it absolutely doesn’t matter how good we are at something, and we are not in the least concerned with how we appear to others. Our society is youth oriented. The young people are running around and working hard to become something. Retirement is the perfect time of life to focus on being and give up becoming. We are no longer immersed in the pressures of work and the world in general.
Where we live here in Green Valley, Arizona, there are a lot of bees and birds, and wildlife, and old people, all sharing the spaciousness of being.

Thanks For the Memories

The other day I was thinking about a couple of people I never got a chance to thank, but would have liked to. One was my 5^th grade teacher, Mr. Atkins, and the other was Bob Hope. I narrowly missed an opportunity to thank  Mr. Atkins when my friend Paul and I went back to Ferguson in 2002. We walked around the old neighborhood and then over to Lee Hamilton Elementary School which we both attended in the fifties. School had just let out and as soon as the kids left the building, we got a chance to go in and talk to some of the staff. When I asked about Mr. Atkins, the secretary told me he had died recently. She said he spent his whole teaching career at the school and that he had been retired for a number of years.
I don’t remember anything specific Mr. Atkins said to me, except that at a time when I was having trouble in school, he made me feel like I had great potential and could do anything I put my mind to. I was a poor student as a kid and at times, a nervous wreck. In the sixth grade my anxiety about school became so bad my parents took me out of public school and placed me in a private one. But I had no problems in Mr. Atkins’ 5th grade class. When the secretary told us about his recent death, it hit me that sometime during my life I could have at least sent him a letter or a card. He was right there at Lee Hamilton School the whole time, I’m sure helping kids feel better about themselves. I hope some of them made the effort to thank him.
I don’t think Bob Hope needed my thanks. He was arguably the most popular entertainer in the world for many years and he received numerous awards. I know there are and have been thousands of veterans like me who feel immense gratitude toward him. The love and concern he felt for the men and women fighting America’s wars was genuine and it came through in the shows he put on for the troops. He said once that his greatest honor was becoming an honorary veteran.
I recently read one of his autobiographical books called, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me. It was about his show business career with the focus on the USO shows for military personnel. It all started in May 1941, when he was asked to take his popular radio show to March Field and perform live for the Army soldiers. He said at first he resisted the idea, but eventually was talked into it. This was before Pearl Harbor and our involvement in WWII. He realized early that these men and women were desperate for familiar sounds and sights from home and what they needed more than anything was to laugh. For that first show, he brought along Ray Milland, but soon realized the men in the audience wanted to see girls. So he started bringing along popular starlets of the time. He states in the book, “We represented everything those new recruits didn’t have: home cooking, mother, and soft roommates.”
From that very first show Hope felt he had been transported to comedy heaven. Even mediocre jokes got big laughs. After one so-so joke he comments, “The laughter was so loud I had to look down to see if my pants had fallen.” After returning to the civilian audiences,  “The memory of the generous laughter at March Field haunted me…” He was hooked.
He headlined more than sixty USO tours over a span of fifty years, taking his troop to Europe and all over the Islands of the Pacific during WWII, later to Korea during the war and then to Vietnam. He even did shows for the troops during the first Gulf war. His entourage had many close calls, but this only seemed to make him more determined to continue bringing shows to the fighting men and women. He started calling the soldiers and sailors he entertained, “my kids” even though at the time, he wasn’t much older.
I got the opportunity to see the show in Chu Lai, Vietnam, Christmas of 1967. My buddies and I took a cooler full of beer and drove up Highway 1 to the Americal Division Headquarters outdoor amphitheater. We were pretty far in the back, but the acoustics were good, so we didn’t miss a thing. This 1967 Christmas tour was made into a documentary film and can be viewed on you-tube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzOsLRT7d5c.
He had four women performers with him that year, Raquel Welch, Barbara McNair, Elaine Dunn and Miss World, who he introduced by saying, “I just wanted you to remember what you’re fighting for.” Also with him was Phil Crosby, one of Bing’s sons. Some of his jokes were about Bing and you could tell how highly he valued their friendship. This was the first overseas show without his lifelong friend, the comedian Jerry Colonna. The music was provided by Les Brown and his Band of Reknown. Bob characterized himself as a big chicken and made jokes about how scared he was when the firing started or the bombs fell. We all laughed uproariously at these jokes not daring to admit to our fellow soldiers that we were all just as scared much of the time.
On that tour, Hope and his troop did shows at 22 bases in 15 days. Some of Bob’s jokes were specific to each area they were in and that included Chu Lai. These were the jokes that got the biggest laughs. At the time, much of the country was against the war and it was hard for us to think about the lack of support at home. For a little while anyway, Bob Hope’s USO show countered all those feelings. They closed the show with Barbara McNair leading us all in the singing of Silent Night. I know there wasn’t a dry eye in the audience.
I consider this show to be one of the highlights of my life. Watching parts of it on you-tube now, my appreciation certainly wasn’t because it was the best entertainment I’d ever seen. The music was mostly from the previous generation. And I didn’t realize at the time that Raquel Welch doesn’t sing or dance very well. She was out performed by Elaine Dunn and Barbara McNair who were great entertainers. But Raquel was probably the biggest hit because she looked so hot in her skimpy blue and white knit mini-dress. I know that’s what I remember most from the show. The guys in the photography section of our Intelligence detachment took pictures of her from all angles, blew them up and made quite a bit of money selling them to other soldiers and sailors. Indeed, she represented what we were all fighting for.
So I wish I could have thanked Bob and Mr. Atkins, two men who made me feel cared about at two very stressful times of my life.

Truth or Consequences, a Town or a Game Show?

In the previous blog I mentioned three game shows that I used to watch in the ‘50s with my neighbor, Mrs. Howard. One of them was Truth or Consequences, hosted by Bob Barker. When Katie and I were looking for a place in the southwest in which to relocate after retirement, we spent several nights in a town of the same name, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. We flew into El Paso, spent a night in Las Cruces and then drove up highway 25. The town was known for its healing hot springs and so fleeing the cold and damp of  March on the Olympic Peninsula, it seemed like the perfect place to go.
We stayed at River Bend Hot Springs. It used to be a youth hostel and was less expensive than some of the other resort spas. It is the only resort right on the edge of the Rio Grande. We stayed in a converted mobile home that was comfortable and clean. The mineral hot springs bubbled up into stone tubs previously used as fish bait ponds, with a choice of temperatures, mild,  medium or hot. A separate tub was positioned so close to the edge of the embankment that you could spit into the river as you soaked. I, of course, would never do that. Check out the site at, http://www.riverbendhotsprings.com/
Truth of Consequences is an unusual name for a town. The locals told us that they refer to it as “T or C” for short and that indeed it was named after the game show. As Katie and I wandered around town doing our tourist thing and feeling mellow after our hot soak, we stumbled upon Ralph Edwards Park. I remembered Ralph from the TV show This is Your Life, but didn’t connect him with Truth or Consequences. I found out later that he was the originator of the show, which he hosted on the radio from 1940 until 1957 and on television from 1950 until 1954. Bob Barker took over as host in 1956.
In 1950 Ralph wanted to commemorate the shows tenth year anniversary, so a staff member suggested finding a town or city that would be willing to name itself after the show. The tenth anniversary show could then be broadcast from that town. I don’t know what the town council of the perfectly named Hot Springs, New Mexico was thinking, but they decided to do it. And this was at least 15 years before psychedelic drugs were widely used. Maybe soaking in all that mineral water made their brains soft and mushy. So on April 1, 1950 the Truth or Consequences show was broadcast from the newly named town of Truth or Consequences, Mew Mexico and from that day on, this date was christened by the town as Ralph Edwards Day. Every year for the rest of his life, Ralph returned to T or C on the first weekend of May to celebrate what is now called Fiesta.
The actual game of Truth or Consequences was pretty silly. The contestants were asked trivia questions that they could rarely answer. If they got the answer wrong, Beula the Buzzer went off and they had to pay the consequences, which was usually something zany and slightly embarrassing. For example, on one show a man read an account of a WWII airplane dogfight and the woman contestant had to make all the sound effects to accompany the reading. A middle-aged woman attempting to make airplane and gunfire sounds was kind of funny. The audience was laughing at and not with the contestant, not unlike some of the stupid shows that are on today. The show had a softer side though. At times they would reunite contestants with long lost friends or relatives. This is possibly what led to Ralph’s This is Your Life show idea.
Another unexpected find in T or C was a half sized Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Wall. It had been a traveling wall until 2002, at which time it was purchased by the state of New Mexico with the help of local T or C businesses. Katie and I spent a little time at the Wall. It was quite emotional for me seeing all those individuals from our time and generation, most of them young, like I was, robbed of their lives by a war that should never have happened in the first place. There are guys I knew up there and I felt lucky not to be one of them, but also guilty that I’m not. They have a nice, simple website for this wall. http://www.torcveteransmemorial.com/
In researching this topic, I ran across a dark chapter in the history of T or C. Five miles outside of town is a small community called Elephant Butte. This is where the “Toy Box Killer” David Parker Ray lived. This guy was a scumbag with a capital SCUM. I quote from Wikipedia,
“David Parker Ray tortured and presumably killed his victims in a $100,000 homemade torture chamber he called his "toy box", which was equipped with what he referred to as his "friends": whips, chains, pulleys, straps, clamps, leg spreader bars, and surgical blades and saws. With these tools it is thought that he terrorized Truth or Consequences for several years with the added assistance of multiple accomplices.”
One of his victims was able to escape and testified in court against him. He was sent to prison for multiple lifetimes, but died of a heart attack shortly after  incarceration. It is estimated that he had anywhere from 14-60 victims during that several year period. He perfected a way of cutting open the body so it would sink in water and they never found any bodies as evidence. There’s no indication that the “Toy Box Killer” was a fan of the show, but his gruesome crimes in T or C give new meaning to  Ralph Edwards, standard opening line, “Hello, we’ve been waiting for you.”
I would definitely recommend going to Truth or Consequences for a visit and staying at River Bend Hot Springs. But if anyone in town asks you a difficult trivia question, turn and run like hell, the consequences could be ghastly. Mrs. Howard and I were fans of Bob Barker and I prefer the way he ended the show, “Hoping all your consequences are happy ones.”

The Path of Love

When I was 3 years old my dad found a puppy wandering alone on the railroad tracks and brought her home. It was around Christmas time, so he gave her to me on Christmas Eve as a present. I named her Cookie. She was my constant companion during the day and slept at the foot of my bed every night. She was loyal and taught me about unconditional love. As a young boy I remember lying in bed at night, Cookie pressed against my leg and crying because I realized she would die before me.

Growing up I lived as though my life would always safely contain my mom, dad, sister and Cookie. We lived in the same house in Ferguson, Mo. from 1953 until 1965. From my perspective now, that doesn’t seem like a very long time. But those were my formative years and so for the rest of my life that house on Moundale Drive will always feel like my true home.

Next door were the Howards, an elderly couple who never had children. When mom started working and I was in elementary school, Mrs. Howard took care of Cookie and me if I were sick or there was no school for some reason. I loved my time with her. We developed a routine together. We watched television in the morning, three game shows in a row: The Price is Right with Bill Cullen, Truth or

Consequences with Bob Barker and Tic Tac Dough with Gene Rayburn. For lunch we often had chicken noodle or tomato soup and Braunschweiger on saltine crackers. She made her special sauce of catsup, mayonnaise and I don’t know what else, to spread on the Braunschweiger. I always raved about it. She also had special treats for Cookie. I was the child she never had and I came with a nice little dog.
Missouri has crappy weather much of the year, but as a boy it didn’t phase me. I loved being outside any time of the year, riding my bike, exploring Moline Creek or just tromping around. My friends and I went to January-Wabash Park to swim in the public pool in the summer and ice-skate on the lake in the winter. And on the fourth of July, they put on a big fireworks display. My friend, Paul, lived nearby and he was always eager to do something together. It’s not easy being a kid and I had my struggles, but in general life was good and full of love and support.
By the time I got out of the Army, everything had changed. Cookie died while I was in Vietnam. My mom didn’t tell me until I returned home. She felt I had had enough grief in the war and didn’t want to add to it. My heart had closed down in Vietnam for survival purposes. I had witnessed too much cruelty, death and suffering. I remember thinking when she told me about Cookie’s death, You think I’m going to get upset about a dog dying, after what I’ve been through. I had no feelings at the time, even though my lifelong loyal companion was gone. My parents moved to Kentucky and so whenever I visited them, it was in a strange city where I didn’t know a soul. The Howards had moved back to Decatur, Illinois. I never saw Mrs. Howard again. Sometime in the 80’s I got a letter from Mr. Howard telling me she had died. He had enclosed a photograph of her headstone. Paul was away at college and we could only see each other rarely. The life I counted on for those 12 years was gone.

But I carried the essence of my childhood with me as my life unfolded. I had internalized those values learned in the ‘50s growing up in Ferguson. I had other pets, each one unique, and each one responding to the love and loyalty that Cookie taught me. I knew how to give and receive love in a family, because I learned that from my parents and my sister. I also knew how to be a supportive loyal friend, because of my lifelong relationship with Paul. 

It took me two tries to find the right partner, but practice makes perfect. When I met Katie I knew right away that she was the one. There is nothing better than sharing your life with a person to whom you give your heart completely. 

When our son Ben was born, my heart was ripped wide open. When he died at age 28, I would have given my life in exchange for his without a moment’s hesitation.

My path is the path of love. Love is the purest and most satisfying of human emotions and sometimes it hurts like hell.