Oh, to be a boy again.
To still see the Men,
Who protected me.

Oh, to be a boy again.
The world I found
wasn’t what I expected to see

What I didn’t know,
and couldn’t under stand,
Was the ways of the World,
And how hard it was for a Man.
Of the gun to try to be peaceful.

I found myself torn,
between the land that I loved
and the morels I cherished
as god up above,
But in the end I did what they told me.

Oh, to be a boy again.
To still see the Men
Who protected me.

Oh, to be a boy again.
The world I found
wasn’t what I expected to see

I fought for my country
I fought for the Truth
And so died my innocence
And so died my Youth
While Regan and Bush were dancing

Today I look
At the Men at the Top
And all the corruption
As well as the Rot
And wonder how to lance that Boil.

Oh, to be a boy again.
To still see the Men
Who protected me.

Oh, to be a boy again.
My Grandfather
wasn’t that different from me…

Researchers from Murdoch University in Perth were not quite sure what they were seeing when they first photographed the activity, in 2007, in which dolphins would shake conch shells at the surface of the ocean.

“It’s a fleeting glimpse — you look at it and think, that’s kind of weird,” said Simon Allen, a researcher at the university’s Cetacean Research Unit.

“Maybe they’re playing, maybe they’re socializing, maybe males are presenting a gift to a female or something like that, maybe the animals are actually eating the animal inside,” he added.

But researchers were more intrigued when they studied the photos and found the back of a fish hanging out of the shell, realizing that the shaking drained the water out of the shells and caused the fish that was sheltering inside to fall into the dolphins’ mouths.

A search through records for dolphins in the eastern part of Shark Bay, a population that has been studied for nearly 30 years, found roughly half a dozen sightings of similar behavior over some two decades.

‘Tantalizing possibility’
Then researchers saw it at least seven times during the four-month research period starting this May, Allen said.

“There’s a possibility here — and it’s speculation at this stage — that this sort of change from seeing it six or seven times in 21 years to seeing it six or seven times in three months gives us that tantalizing possibility that it might be spreading before our very eyes,” he added.

“It’s too early to say definitively yet, but we’ll be watching very closely over the next couple of field seasons,” Allen said.

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While the term “animism” refers to a broad range of spiritual beliefs (many of which are still extant within human cultures today), it does not denote any particular religious creed or doctrine. The most common feature of animist religions is their attention to particulars, as evidenced by the number and variety of spirits they recognize. This can be strongly contrasted with the all-inclusive universalism of monotheistic, pantheistic and panentheistic traditions. Furthermore, animist spirituality is more focused on addressing practical exigencies (such as health, nourishment and safety needs) than on solving abstract metaphysical quandaries. Animism recognizes that the universe is alive with spirits and that humans are interrelated with them.

Brown ground beef and drain off excess fat.Return to heat and add chili powder, curry powder, garlic and onion.
Mix well and cook together (stirring often) until onions start to turn clear.
Add remainder of ingredients, and cook until thickened.

Notes: I have had this several times with no additional swelling of my feet.
Most of the salt comes from the Salsa, so if this is too much salt for you make your own Salsa.
Of course if you use canned corn or beans this will also add salt to the recipe.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZP-4B7kHqA

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtSzcKZGzDs

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ce8ix4VGR2w

I remember occasionally hearing  Grandad sing, although it was usually when no one was around.

A couple of the songs he liked were:
Red Haired Mary

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXzjX2aVvuE

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PyotG-_JiY

The first commercial song I remember really liking was “The Unicorn”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EPsuOEH1fY

When I was about 4 or 5 Mom married George the 1st. George the 1st didn’t allow “modern” music in the house, much of what he played was big band music that left me flat.
However I do remember some favorites from the years Mom was married to him, including :

Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pfCFU3Mqww

Chattanooga Choo Choo

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdrYYUuT07Q

and 16 Tons

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Joo90ZWrUkU

As well as old Folk Music favorite Ol’ Blue

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHyi-R3Q2gM

I first heard “modern” music (meaning current for then) in 1976.
I didn’t really know what to make of most Rock and Country songs back then, but a few songs caught my attention almost right away.
Many of them were a few years old by then, but to me the music of the ’60s and early ’70s happened almost at one time due to my sheltered upbringing.
Some of these songs were:
Tell Laura I Love Her:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OhY8hVzsic

Desperado

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE-U5e78WHc

Billy Don’t be a Hero

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS2nW6w-sZQ

The Night Chicago Died

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-L0NpaErkk

Soon after moving to Oklahoma Mom met and married Red.
Red was a pretty easygoing guy, with a wide taste in music. He soon turned me on to several groups and musicians.
Some of the songs I remember listening to with him were:

Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u8D33fJs4M

Tales of Brave Ulysses

www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8hLc_nqx8g

Going to California

www.youtube.com/watch?v=luDgb5vVHuA

Shannon

www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Wpn3dFrEs

Wildfire:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc3OnSQc48s

I was behind the times as far as music goes, and it showed. When I was in 8th grade a girl I went to school with asked me what my favorite band was. I replied “The Irish Rovers” she laughed at me, but I still love their music to this day.

Mom divorced Red, but I still consider him and his family kin. I have lost touch with them over the years, and I deeply regret it.

When my uncle and cousin were murdered these songs kept coming to my mind:

Stairway to Heaven

www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9TGj2jrJk8

Live and Let Die

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK2hKzZss5Y

Let it Be

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdopMqrftXs

Yesterday

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONXp-vpE9eU

When I was in 9th grade I met Big Bill, who would rapidly become one of my best friends. We had similar taste in music, and he turned me on to lots of great songs, including:

Iron Man:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LjbMVXj0F8

McArthur’s Park:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaZim6ybvdA

All Dead, All Dead

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9VXjFzWIgE

and 99 Luft Baloons:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQYQTFudrqc

When I turned 17 I joined the Army. It really helped to broaden my musical horizons.I became exposed to stuff that hadn’t really made it’s way to Oklahoma yet like Punk Rock and New Wave.
Some of the songs I first heard when I was in the Army included:

Military Rap:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyhvlnpvKKg

Close Your Eyes:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QxClueCXGo

Bad Reputation

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RAQXg0IdfI

When I was living in Galveston there wasn’t much Rock music, so I learned to love (some) country music. Here’s some from back then:

A Country Boy Can Survive:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4s0nzsU1Wg

Cherokee Fiddle:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEMbiEzqv-I

During my second enlistment I became involved with the S.C.A. . This helped me find access to Celtic music, which I had loved since my earliest years.
If you haven’t noticed I always loved ballads, and the Irish are masters of the form.
In fact most traditional Irish songs are ballads.
Some of the songs I remember finding during this time period were:

Boys of Bedlam

www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8VD8tx3l_w

The Limerick Rake

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8moLHIW8xw

Seven Drunken Nights

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CWIIoSf4nw

Piano Man

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8sFlBJ1Jk3w

Return to Pooh Corner

www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9J5o1iVfAw

After I got out of the Army I drifted around Florida for a while, and I was exposed to a lot of cultures I have never encountered before. I had heard Reggie music before, but not much. However when I lived in the Keys I learned to love it. Especially Bob Marley (and later his kids) work.

A couple of my favorites are:

Redemption song.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnJgIq48C9k

Buffalo Soldier

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5FCdx7Dn0o

Other songs that stand out from the first time I lived in Florida are:

Patience

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErvgV4P6Fzc

Mony Mony

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAmgTNATJkk

Love Shack

www.youtube.com/watch?v=leohcvmf8kM

Sunday Bloody Sunday

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM4vblG6BVQ

Eventually we (Laura and I) moved to Hot Springs.
When she left me and moved back to Florida these songs kept running through my mind:

Fire and Rain

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T35WXFOmwI

Objects in the Rear-view Mirror

www.youtube.com/watch?v=37GrbCUvZEM

Wasted Time

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAXHQygPPKk

Wild World

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHXpnZi9Hzs

A few years later a friend needed a place to stay. He introduced me to his step-dad Mike.
Mike turned me on to quite a bit of Native American Folk music. Some of my favorites are:

Reservation Road

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsNp5gufdqw

Blow Dakota Blow

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BudkMMbFD3E

Patriot

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkRbHJ0Zrbo

Eventually my health went downhill and I had to move to Florida. I really missed Hot Springs, and this song kept sticking in my mind.

Caledonia

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP8A9rtg0iI

Another song I first heard while living there was Johnny’s Ghost.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yR4g-gsTZS4

A few years ago I moved back to Hot Springs.
Now I find myself quickly closing in on fifty, and have been down with heart problems most of this year. Somehow the old song Night Moves seems more poignant than ever.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRFWQoXq4c

I woke last night to the sound of thunder..How far off I sat and wondered…Strange how the night moves, with autumn closing in…

Journey bread was the medieval equivalent of C-Rations. It was intended to be carried on long journeys and to provide most of the nutrition one would need.

This particular recipe had lots of sweet fruits in it as well as nuts.

The plan was to make a starter batch and use that to make the larger batch rise. Our starter batch made about 2 gallons in a 5 gallon pot. This would have worked out fine, but it was closer to the weekend of the event than we would have liked so we added a little yeast to the dough to make sure the starter would start rising soon.

I know now that was a mistake, but I wasn’t very experienced in baking bread, so it sounded good to me at the time. We put a lid on the pan in case it popped a few dough bubbles and went home to let it rise overnight.

The next day my section chief called me over and told me in no questionable terms that I was going to report to the national guard armory after work to clean up my mess. Ollie had received the same message, so we showed up together to clean up our mess.

We were stunned when we walked into the room. We had no idea how destructive dough could be.

The Journey Bread dough had not just bubbled up, it had climbed out of that five gallon pot and assaulted the room. There was dough everywhere, the table the pot was on, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the racks of dishes across the room, everywhere!!

We cleaned that kitchen from top to bottom, including all the dishes and utensils in it. After we finished cleaning we decided to try and tame the dough still in the pan. We took all but about half a gallon of it and froze it for future use, and made a batch of dough using the half gallon we saved as a starter in the same five gallon pot. We put a lid on it and agreed to bake it the next night.

The next day I was again told that I would report to the armory after work to clean up my mess.

Now, I would have thought that after the great battle for the kitchen the night before the dough monster would be too tired to cause any more problems, but I would have been sadly mistaken. When we arrived we saw that it had re-claimed the kitchen (and a bit of the hallway) as it’s own. We again battled the dough monster most of the night, until we had the hall, kitchen, and everything in it clean.

We decided that the dough was probably too yeasty to use at this point and used a small amount of what remained in the pot as starter for yet another batch, and froze the rest to be use as starter at some future time. (That time hasn’t arrived yet, and Ollie’s spirit has since joined the Great Mystery.)

We put the lid on that five gallon pot, and tied it down to make sure the dough monster didn’t escape again.

That time the monster behaved and we made lot’s of journey bread for “Walt Wars” (originally “Salt Wars”) .

When I was in High School one of my best friends was Big Bill.

Big Bill was a very large boy. Not as in fat, but tall and brawny in a classic Germanic way, square jawline and all. He was the best type of friend, and we were nearly inseparable.

However he wasn’t always the brightest pebble on the beach.

There was a big hill in Edmond, just a few blocks from C.S.U., that ran for a 3-4 block distance and was pretty steep.
Naturally being into skateboarding it was too much for me to resist.
Back then I had never heard of skateboarding pads and helmets. (I don’t think T.G.&Y. would have had them anyway.) But I did have a motorcycle helmet that I would wear when “boarding” the more dangerous hills.

This hill may have been the most dangerous in town. The road was made of concrete that had big tar filled cracks in it. The trick was to be going fast enough to skip over those sticky cracks.

That particular day Big Bill was on his bike so he could tell me how fast I was going (he had a speedometer on his bike).

I had kicked my board as fast as I could get it to go before I hit the hill.

Once on the hill I was zooming right along. I had squatted down low to lower my center of gravity, spread my arms out to improve my balance, and I was well into the ride, skimming over the cracks, when a girl I knew pulled beside me in a V.W. Bug. She honked, and I waved as she sped off.

That wave was nearly my undoing.

When my right hand went up my skateboard hit a crack and went left.
Next thing I knew I was airborne. Now, being airborne doesn’t hurt at all. The bouncing however, is another story.

I hit the pavement, bounced, hit it again, bounced, hit the curb, bounced, then rolled up the embankment through sand-spurs and briers.
I stopped about ten feet up the embankment. My helmet had been shattered into five or six pieces. The only thing holding it together were the steel bands inside it.
My back was raw, and full of stickers.

Big Bill ran up and asked me The Stupid Question: “Are you O.K.?”

When I’m in pain I tend to be,well, let’s just say cranky…
I sarcastically told Big Bill “I’m great, just pull these stickers out of my back.”
What I didn’t know was that the remains of my t-shirt were pinned to my back by those stickers.

Big Bill grabbed the tail of my t-shirt and pulled the whole thing off in one huge RIP!!
Have you ever been in so much pain that you get high from the combination of endorphins and shock?
Yep, I had a serious pain buzz going.
That’s when the cop showed up. He stopped his car rolled down the window and asked The Stupid Question: “Is he O.K.?”
Big Bill waved at him and yelled out “He’s just fine officer”.
The cop just shook his head and drove away.

I went ballistic on Big Bill.
“Why did you say that? This hurts like hell!! I need to go to the hospital!”
Big Bill’s soft reply “But you said you were great….”
Big Bill was nothing if not a good trooper. He walked with me all the way to the hospital and called my Mom to let her know what happened.
I had scraped my left elbow almost to the bone and fractured it, fractured a few ribs and had a mild concussion.

Of course as soon as Mom arrived she asked me The Stupid Question…..

I left a lot of things out and simplified how some of the things came about, but it contains the most prevalent memories.

———————————————————————————————————​—-

HMMM, let me just hit some highlights, it’s been a long eventful life.

You might remember, during my junior year of High School my Mom kicked me out of the house. I stayed off and on with friends and with my ex-step dad Red Melton, and worked at McDonalds.

I was planning to join the Air Force when I graduated, but circumstances led me to drop out of school that summer and enlist. Big Bill and I went down to the recruiters office together, but his ASVAB scores weren’t high enough to get in the Air Force. We then went to the Army Recruiter and his scores were too low for them too, so we went to the Marines. They were willing to take him, but they didn’t have a medical program, and I wanted to work in the medical field, so he joined the Marines and I joined the Army to be a combat medic (91b).

I spent my first enlistment as a medic, and I re-enlisted as a MLRS crew member.(I wanted to stay a medic, but Uncle Sam said he needed people with good security clearances to work with the then new MLRS system. (You can see it in action at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brkrybAm8f4&NR=1 )

As a kid I always used to get these god awful pains in my left hip and down my leg. Mom would always tell me it was growing pains, so I thought everybody hurt like that.
In my second enlistment I injured my back, and found out the reason the vertebra I had injured had been weak was because I had a type of Spina Bifida, a birth defect.
I was shocked, but things starting making sense.
I had hunted, hiked, Wrestled, done gymnastics, Boxed, even jumped out of planes, with a birth defect that often cripples it’s victims. I was both tough and lucky, tough (or stubborn) enough to do the things I loved to do, and lucky it hadn’t caught up with me before that. Of course now I know that pain was sciatica..

My 2nd enlistment lasted less than 2 years.
During that 2nd enlistment I joined a group that re-enacts the middle ages called the S.C.A. (The Society For Creative Anachronisms at http://www.sca.org )
While at a S.C.A. event I met the love of my life, Laura.

When I got out of the Army the 2nd time my Mom was living just south of where I was stationed (Fort Stewart Georgia) in Jacksonville Florida, so I moved to Jacksonville.
Laura lived in Florida too and we would see each other at S.C.A . events. We became good friends, and I chased her for nearly five years before she took me seriously and married me. (She got a laugh from me putting it that way, she’s reading over my shoulder..)

I was too stubborn to apply for disability so I would work whatever type of job I could find until my health would eventually go downhill for a while and I would be jobless again.
As a result I learned to pick up skills quickly, and worked my diverse jobs over the years including semi-truck driver, nurses aid (I had to quit that one because I couldn’t deal with the old folks I befriended dieing), construction, concrete monument maker, vacuum cleaner salesman (rainbow), silversmith, mechanic, and jeweler.

Laura was out of work, and eventually we were reduced to living out of our car.
Both of us were adventurous, so we decided if we had to live out of our car we might as well live on the road. We were like leaves in the wind, traveling all over Florida and getting work where ever I could find it.

Eventually we fell in with the Rainbow People ( http://www.welcomehome.org/rainbow/index.html ), and lived on a commune called Yonder’s Farm near Macon Georgia for around a year. Eventually we made our way to Hot Springs Arkansas and I found work here designing jewelry at a live in co-op. I had been doing that for a few months when my Grandad died.

I never met my father, but my Grandad was one of the brightest lights in my life. I idolized and adored him. I always said if I grew up to be half the man my Grandad was I would be a good person. He taught me many things, one of the foremost was a love of animals and nature. (I still cry every time I think of him, I miss him so much!!)

When he died I was so torn up by it that I couldn’t think straight, let alone work and I lost my job and our place to live 2 days later.

The wilds have always been my refuge, so Laura and I went to one of the mountains I used to dig crystals on. I dug crystals all day and cried all night for a week. After the first week we were badly in need of a shower so we went into town, rented a hotel room and enjoyed civilization overnight and went back up the mountain the next day. At the end of the next week I was breaking down camp, getting ready to go back into town and clean up again when a NDN medicine man walked into my camp and told me Great Spirit had sent him up the mountain to get me. He was camped at a nearby lake, and we moved our camp to there too. (Not as nice as a hotel room, but at least we could clean up.)

I had studied with a medicine man for a while when I was living in Florida (I don’t know if you remember, but I’m mixed blood, Irish and Cherokee), and this man (Greg Beaverpipe) wanted me to help him build a sweat lodge for a man from his tribe who lived a few miles away from the mountain Greg had found me on.
We had some long talks as he counseled me in my grief, and I helped him build the lodge and helped to run the first few ceremonies as he taught the local man how to do things.
Afterwards he asked me to carry a message from him to a medicine man in Colorado, and I was hurting enough inside to try and run from my pain so we headed west.

When we left Hot Springs Laura and I had some of the jewelry I had made, a car trunk full of quartz crystals, a full tank of gas in our old Delta 88, and $20.
It was a wonderful and moving trip. We got to see the Dinosaur Footprint National Park, Pikes Peak, and many more absolutely beautiful places. I remember there was one campground with a creek running through it, and the bottom of the creek looked like it was lined with gold dust because of all the mica in the sand.

There was another campground right on top of the continental divide called The Angel of Shavano.
It was totally primitive camping, but it had a trout stream and a beaver pond, and a prairie dog town.
We would wake up in the morning and a mist would lay over the little valley, and wild Deer and Elk would just walk right through camp. It was so enchanting we spent a week there just enjoying the beauty.

We spent money when we had to, but tried to barter crystals and jewelry when we could. We were able to barter for lodging (at the Dinosaur Footprint National I traded them a quartz cluster for their museum in return for camping and access), gas (most notably at the last chance gas station in the Oklahoma panhandle, just outside the little painted desert), and dried/canned food.
Between barter and my woodland survival skills we wanted for nothing while we were traveling.
When we had left Hot Springs we couldn’t even find out destination (Hotchkiss Colorado) on the map. The town was so small it wasn’t even listed..
We had headed west and navigated by intuition and faith.
By the time we found out where it was we were less than 50 miles away from it.
We arrived with $20, a mostly full tank of gas, and lots of crystals.
The medicine man I was sent to meet was out of town, so we camped until we found a small 1 room building to live in just outside of town.
Eventually the medicine man came back and we delivered the message. While in Colorado, I had the most powerful spiritual experience of my life when I was caught in a flash flood in the high desert. (But that’s a story unto it’s self.)
While in Colorado I also finally applied for disability, and it came through in about 3 months. I took the money I first received and bought an old truck and a small camping trailer. It wasn’t big, but no matter what we would have a roof over our head. After living out of a car off and on for a few years it was a measure of security.
We stayed until winter, and then headed back to Hot Springs.

When we arrived in Hot Springs I rented a place to put my camper trailer from a friend.

We had lived there for nearly 2 years when Laura left me.
I was devastated, and I didn’t understand why she would just leave me without any warning.. The only things in my life that hit me as hard was when my uncle and cousin were murdered and when Grandad died.
I went off the deep end of depression for a while, but after several months I started to pull myself together.

One day the city sent someone out to my trailer to tell me that my trailer wasn’t big enough to live in and that I was homeless. I certainly didn’t consider myself homeless. I had lived in much less comfortable circumstances, but they forced me to move out of my cozy little trailer and into town.
I ended up living in an “efficiency” apt. in town.
It wasn’t as nice as my trailer had been, and didn’t really have any more useful room.

A couple of years later I was visiting my Mom for the holidays when my little step-sister introduced me to the internet. It wasn’t common yet, but my step-dad Dave is a collage professor and needed access for his job.
I took to computers and the internet like a duck to water. Within 24 hours I was teaching them things!
I had been trying to help make ends meet by designing and selling silver jewelry, and the internet looked like a great way to do business, so I talked to my folks and they said they would get me a computer if I would go back to school.

When I got home I contacted vocational re-hab and they sent me to a private self-paced computer school.
I went through the courses so fast my teachers head was spinning. I took 3 months worth of self paced classes in a few weeks.
After finishing and graduating from that school I still hadn’t learned how to design websites (although I was starting to figure it out for myself), and decided to go to the local community college.

I went there for a year, but health problems came up again, and I dropped out.

A couple of years later my health took another turn for the worse and I moved to Florida where my folks could keep an eye out for me and make sure I was able to get to doctors appointments.

That was Jan 2001.

I woke the morning of 9/11 to the same horrors the rest of our great nation suffered that day. I got angry that someone had attacked our home. I cried for the people I watched die,. I was moved beyond measure by the bravery of the firemen and rescue people trying to save as many lives as they could. I was stuck to the T.V. all day..

That night as I lay sleeping in my recliner I had a stroke.

I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t feel my body, and I could hear something scraping back and forth against my ear. I realized that I was having a seizure. When it stopped I was too tired to move. I lay there until morning when my Mom checked on me and took me to the doctor.

It was a very dark place in my life.
My hands shook so bad I couldn’t even use a fork or spoon, so I would eat sandwiches and other “out of hand” foods to try and keep my problems from being too obvious. (The only one I was fooling was myself.) I was having several seizures a day, and my long term memory seemed to be totally disconnected.
For the first time in my life I felt like I was beat. I was ready to just curl up and die.

The only bright point in my life was my baby nephew Cody. He had been born Oct. 2000. I couldn’t hold him after my stroke because I was so shaky and weak I was afraid I might drop him.
He was so tiny… I shed tears of joy the first time I held him, my baby brothers little son.. I’ve never had any children of my own, and my Mom was overjoyed to be a “Granny”.

By the time Cody was 2 my seizures had finally slacked off, my long term memory was starting to come back, and my shaking had died down to a fairly manageable level, so I decided it was time to start having a social life again.

I started going to S.C.A. events again (I had been a member for nearly 20 years at that point), and going out to the the local bars. I couldn’t drink so I would drink coke.

I soon met a girl named Lisa.
Lisa was a single mother of 2 girls who had just gotten out of a bad marriage. We hit it off well and they soon moved in with me.
I loved having kids in the house. Raising children was something painfully missing in my life.
The oldest girl, Sarah Belle, was 3 years old and the younger girl Lena Boo was a 9 month old baby at the time.
Lisa and I were together for several months, but it was a bounce-back relationship for her, and like most romances of that type it didn’t last.
I was upset, but I realized that I loved the kids more than her. I’m afraid that I still hadn’t totally gotten over my ex-wife Laura leaving me years before.
I remained friends with Lisa and tried to be there for the kids. They were over often, and the kids though of my Mom as Granny just like my nephew did.

Eventually I got homesick for Hot Springs, and decided to return home. Lisa had always told me that if I moved to Hot Springs her and the girls would move here too. But she didn’t follow through.

Lisa had grown up in Buffalo New York, and had been molested by her father and brothers growing up.
She had gotten married and left New York to get away from them.
Shortly after I came back to Hot Springs her father tracked her down and called her. He told her that he and her brothers had all “gotten right with God”, and talked her into moving back to Buffalo.
The reality was that they had gotten mixed up with some kind of “christian” cult.
They convinced her to cut all contact with anyone not in their “church”. All the members live at the church, and everything is very strict. They even have to take showers because baths are “sinful”.
My little Lena Boo (who was 4 by now) called up my Mom one time crying because they told her that her Granny was going to hell!!!

It breaks my heart, but I no longer have contact with Lisa and the kids. I’m still angry at Lisa for taking them into such a bad situation, but I dearly miss the kids… They may not have been mine biologically, but they were my children in my heart.

A few years after I moved back to Hot Springs I received a surprise phone call. It was my long lost love Laura.
She had re-married (and divorced), and found out life with me wasn’t so bad after all. She started talking about moving back to Hot Springs someday. Neither one of us had ever gotten over the other. We talked daily, and soon ended up in a long distance relationship.
We re-married late that year, and have been back together for 2 1/2 years now. I can’t imagine growing old with anyone else.

Last Feb. I was at an SCA event fighting in a rapier tournament (I’ve always loved martial arts but with the shape I was in all I could do anymore was fencing), when I lost my breath and collapsed.
I was taken to the hospital where I was admitted and treated for pneumonia over a few days. I hadn’t been feeling well for several weeks, but thought it was just my COPD acting up.(I was a smoker for over 20 years.) In fact I had fought in and won a tournament the weekend before.
When they discharged me I was told to contact a cardiologist and have a stress test done. I followed directions, but before it was time for my appointment I started having angina and breathlessness.
I was admitted to the hospital again, my doctor performed an angioplasty and placed a stent in my Right Coronary Artery. (It had been 85% blocked, and had an aneurism forming.) I recovered for a couple of months, and was about to start getting back to my life when it happened again.
My doctor went back into my heart and found the stent had become 70% clogged with scar tissue.
He cleaned it out again and sent me home to recover.
Last month I started having problems again. My feet started swelling (pitting edema), and I started having chest pain again.
My doctor told me that I was close to congestive heart failure and put me on water pills to pull all the swelling from my feet heart and lungs.

I was feeling better until last week when I started having heart palpitations, and difficulty breathing.
I was put back in the hospital. They ran test and found out that the water pills had washed out most of the potassium in my body, which was causing my heart to go into arrhythmia.
They gave be mega-doses of potassium to save my life and went back into my heart. Everything seems to be Ok now, and I am recovering well.
I hope to return to my normal life sometime this year.

Whew!! I didn’t expect this letter to be so long. This is the first time I have written all of this down.
Please realize that this is just a bare outline of the life I have led since high-school, and I have left many things out.

Thanks for taking the time to read all of this!!

Mike

These are stories out of my life.
There will be things I do not disclose, usually because they are just too private or painful to discuss.
That being said I aim to be as open and honest about my experiences as possible. Please keep in mind that these stories are snapshots of my life as it was at that time. People in these stories, including myself, have moved on, matured, and changed.
Some see life as a road, with milestones marking their path. I see life as a river, twisting and turning to accommodate the terrain of our times, with eddies, currents, and the occasional stone.

Combine all ingredients in pan and simmer down to 1 1/2 cups.

Notes:

This is another thin BBQ sauce to be used for cooking and as a condiment.