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(Editing in Progress - If Any of This Makes Sense, You Might Consider Professional Help (:)

Late one afternoon, on a dispersed forest service campsite in the woods up Boulder Canyon Sophie and I encountered a guy who can best be described as a “crazy fucker.” No other words suit this guy. He was some sort of PCP-fueled prophet to a mass of young followers who began arriving one by one. Eventually I got Sophie and I the hell out of there, moving to another site a hundred yards away. Still I could hear the wild masses all night, howling on command at something. 

The next day my curiosity got the best of me and I cautiously wandered over there to survey the damage. But there was none; no sign of the previous evening’s festivities remained. None of the people, their cars, the prophet-nothing. 

Of the few cars that remained I was startled to happen across a terrified little girl, naked except for some sort of wooly animal skin. She had a terrible case of acne, if that helps to guess her general age. These days everyone looks like a baby to me and I’m wrong more often than not when I try to guess people’s age.

Even so I wondered: Was she an innocent, abducted child who played the central figure in some sort of quasi-religious ceremony? Or maybe she was an undergrad out doing something weird to make a few bucks but bit off more than she could chew? 

The previous evening a baby-faced Boulder County deputy appeared, just a scared kid in uniform, who was about pissing himself in fear as he approached that whole group of stoned lunatics. The mass was howling and shrieking one moment then, seeing the cop suddenly quieted as their prophet spoke to the boy-cop: “Yes, Officer, I/we understand, we’ll keep the noise down, etc.” the sort of BS only intended to placate the law and impress upon his flock his godliness. The hollering resumed immediately upon the cop’s departure.

After moving us to a safer campsite for the night, I decided then that Sophie and I would go to Mexico. Whatever crazy ideas anyone ever fed me about the so-called dangers there couldn’t be any crazier than what I saw that night.

It was a good sendoff from Colorado, for it kept me from leaving with an ache in my heart ❤️ for the place. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” I remember telling Sophie. And away we went, and we didn’t look back. That’s the kind of wonderful co-pilot Sophie’s always been, forward-looking and enthused. She’s a reliable reflection of my feelings, and man, was I psyched to cross that Mexican border. I still am, and when the time’s right, I’ll probably miss Colorado and the wonderful, healing experiences I’ve had here. But I think I’ll be happy enough to live out my days as an expat. I’ve researched becoming a legal Mexican resident, enough to access medical care anyway, and even the legality of medical marijuana for my seizures and neuropathy.

We’ve also got friends from Canada 🇨🇦 there that we’ll miss this winter, and we’ll also miss the campground owner Edgar and his family, who we’ve had a mutual adoption, we of them and they of us.

In Mexico, we’re accepted for who we are there, and I don’t recall feeling any ambivalence there. I love the language and the new to me culture, and how much of it I already picked up as a kid from my Mexican grandfather, mi abuelo, el padre de mi padre.

Hmm, let’s see... I think the following is a reply to an email I’d begun to a family member showing justice taking place for a most deserving person. You’ll remember this story, I’m sure:

http://www.sltrib.com/news/2017/10/31/utah-nurse-arrested-for-blocking-cop-from-drawing-blood-from-patient-receives-500000-settlement/

Warms my heart to see this.

You know, I could’ve benefited from witnesses ever since age nine or ten. The cop that hurt Sophie and I in the desert was just a jacked-up kid.

Nothing he could ever do to me could ever scare me, or terrify me like our own father did.

My heart goes out to you for being a survivor of brutality by someone you shouId also have been able to trust. Something about it cuts so much deeper than a stranger’s hurt ever can.

I lived it almost on a daily basis as a kid, and it casts a pretty horrible shadow over my life still: Nightmares, trust issues, inability to maintain intimate relationships, eg with my wife and daughter and others.

Superficial friendships once were terrific, peachy-keen, okey-dokey because nobody knew what went on behind closed doors. Smiling outwardly but too often crying inside.

Endless efforts at therapy and other potential long-term solutions, great people and terrific ideas, have worn me out.

Things I saw and heard no kids should ever experience at home. Long before you were born our parents were young, too young to deserve a child, but there I was anyway.

Not unlike you, I believe. Us both.

“Unplanned” is the term civil people use, while the generic, Catholic term is “ultimate shame,” mortal sin, etc.

You know the terms, you heard it growing up, too. Some things never change, some people never are quite grown up, mature enough to have kids.

Adding insult to injury is how I felt and what I experienced in confronting my childhood abusers.

Just as the guy in the White House can say and do something one moment, and then, right in front of you, deny it the next and completely believe his own lie, I was stonewalled, too.

The guy in the White House, just by being himself with his perpetual sneer and condescending tone, subjectively directed with favor toward some and utter disrespect toward others hits too close to home.

It’s a home I tried, many times, to leave, first as a kid and then, as an adult, ever since.

In being unable to seek validation from my original abusers, I’ve found myself unable to find it elsewhere.

No amount of words like “We paid your college tuition,” or “You’ve always had a roof over your head” can ever take the place of words of contrition, offered voluntarily and without condition, from those who first caused the hurt.

I’m not just speaking for myself, but for anyone who’s ever had their trust violated by someone else.

In grade school it can be the “first crush who left me heartbroken.” This isn’t puppy love, though. Rather, it’s a shocking, slap-in-the-face introduction to how violent grownups can be.

At home, behind closed doors and involving adults, all the name-calling and door-slamming, and the screaming and shouting and cussing, can escalate into domestic violence. It becomes criminal behavior, a crime.

If kept behind those closed doors it becomes a hidden crime - and an ugly secret - that all who live within must never tell.

Even when it comes time to stand in line outside the confessional, waiting your turn to kneel in the darkness and say “Forgive me father, for I have sinned,” you must never tell.

Add kids and it becomes child abuse, yet more violent crime at home. It’s yet another secret that must be kept, especially among the kids now.

But what happens when the kids grow up, as they always do? What becomes of their secret? How is it resolved in their mind?

One obvious answer is to take it back to the source. You’re not a little kid anymore and, even though you may be scared, no one can hurt you now.

So you bring up the subject. There’s no pleasant way to do it, and it’s awkward for everyone, especially you.

“Why would you say these things now?” you are asked, “We always did our best for you kids. All we ever wanted you to do was to get with the program.”

You’re faced with denial and, in a strange way, you find yourself doubting yourself, even though you know that you’re not wrong; the things you saw back then, the screams and the hands on you and the fury in their eyes were all real.

Now they’re telling you it’s not true, you’re making it up and, finally, the closest expression of guilt you’re likely to get from them, “You need to get over it.”

But you can’t. It was a lifetime in the making and, if it were that simple, you’d have done so long ago.

This denial of this on the parents’ part for whatever reason, such as “Good Catholics don’t do such things!” places the weight of the knowledge of these crimes forever on the kids. Though it was never their  fault, it was blamed on them nonetheless.

They’ve become scapegoats, and some are even destined to raise their kids the same way.

I’ve witnessed my share of this, long before you were born. To my credit, this way of life never permeated my home as an adult.

Having never learned the nuances of physical closeness with others through my parents as a baby, I feared the unknown and repeatedly fled.

My recollections of dinner time conversations between parents then were actually commiserations about the various people in our lives.

Usually a person was defined by their ethnicity or religion. My father was most vitriolic about this, but mother held her own:
“Those Jews/Jigaboos/Protestants always X, Y and/or Z,” he’d say. “I cannot understand what’s with those people,” she’d say, “Shame on them!”

And somehow, because my mother didn’t cuss, I didn’t fear her like I did my father, who did. By default and in the absence of anyone else she, the emotionally distant one became the one I turned to for love and understanding. It became my own definition of what Love is.

But the people I relied upon weren’t even mature enough to be self-reliant yet. In many ways, they still aren’t and never will be.

I’ve just described the American president and, given his ubiquitousness, it’s not a surprise that


A. He can trigger these memories for me and


B. It can happen anytime.

I’m too tired to write more, but this writing is the only way I knew how to remain safe.

Campground Life 101: It’s Lonely Here

Though there’s no shortage of people here - someone is always around to talk to if you need it - it doesn’t mean it’s a person with whom I’d care to speak.

There is a painfully evident cultural gap between people here no matter the reason they are here, and not all of us are residents.

Many, like Sophie and I, live full-time in an RV. Others come and go in the manner that seasonal summer campers and transient laborers/skilled workers who live in campers do as their economic obligations require.

While these people live in their campers full time, the place they truly call home, “where the heart is,” is someplace else.

Their outlook on the place I and the other full-timers here call home naturally differs, and the reason is simple. Sophie and I are as transient to them as, well, they are to us.

And the fact remains that, among “us,” vast disparities exist. However, this doesn’t imply anything negative by any means.

Granted, some of these cultural differences go beyond traditional social or (fairly) superficial differences, such as liking country music more than rock music.

Or perhaps some might have humorous tendencies that lean more toward Larry the Cable Guy than by any of the polished,  male-dominated, shirt-and-tie late night network hosts. You get the idea.

For my part, I grew up listening to rock music. However, I can appreciate country music and all music, really, on its merits based on musicians’ technical skill, live performance enjoyment and, yes, themes and lyrical relevance to my life.

I also get Larry the Cable Guy’s humor, and humor from all over the spectrum, really.

But I indulge myself with the above examples in other, probably very different ways than my neighbors.

For example, I prefer listening to jazz music at any time of the day, whether I’m waking up and making coffee or slip-sliding away to La-La Land.

I also prefer watching video documentaries and, well, writing  here, on my blog and elsewhere about subjects of relevance to me.

But that doesn’t mean I haven’t had my share of crazy nights at basement parties where beer comes in kegs, and not cans or bottles.

Where “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” was something we used to say about cigarettes or, on special nights, cigars. We played music at ear-splitting levels that, even back then I wondered would cause long-term damage.

The difference is that I got all of that out of my system as a teenager and, (possibly another difference) while an undergrad. It’s filed away in my mind as a fun time, to be occasionally revisited on warm, moonlight nights or when hearing an old song that triggers a fond memory.

But just as I knew the music was too loud and the cigarettes potentially (okay, probably) harmful to my body, I also knew it served many purposes to me.


not a lifestyle

I Rediscovered A Dream, After Last Night’s Dream

It’s been almost 6 years to the day since I nearly died in a bicycle accident with the car. While I did lose my arm and much of my confidence in everyday safety within my environment, I still have much confidence remaining.

Today, I am on the dole – disability. I’m at the whim of who pays me money, how much they pay me, whatever benefits I might receive, including: healthcare, food stamps, and a host of other benefits designed to help me survive, but not really thrive.

Happily, I can see how these things have helped me have helped me over the past several years. Namely, I don’t have insurmountable medical bills, my student loans have been discharged, and I do pretty well living as I always have - on a shoestring budget with next to no possessions.

On the other hand, I have so much more remaining that I often feel precariously balanced between what I have and what I no longer have.

The one constant I do have is pain. More specifically, nerve pain, which has proven debilitating at times. Still, I’ve found that, no matter how bad the pain, distractions such as writing like this now mitigates the problem considerably, sometimes entirely.

Anyway, the dream I had last night was based on something I’ve thought of most of my adult life, and that’s how accomplished I once was a skier. In fact, everything I did revolved around skiing, particularly other sports.

Mountain biking, road biking, rollerblading and even hockey were all meant to bolster my passion for skiing. Running triathlon was a most enjoyable way to put all of those things together. Only more skiing itself would have been better.

The plan was simply to become a stronger skier during the off-season. As a skier at heart, the qualities required with each of these activities to me made perfect sense.

Increased aerobic capacity, stronger legs and hips, and a stronger sense of balance all contributed to improve performance further, flexibility and other forms of specific bodily improvement led to better performance within all these sports.

I was truly an athlete, more than I’d ever been and more than I would ever give myself credit for. But there I was, and here I’ll always remain.

Though my sporting pursuits had largely been fueled by anger at my past, violent upbringing, my youth was also the place where I developed my passion for cycling and skiing in the first place.

The cycling I had always done on my own, but the skiing I was initially introduced to by my parents, one of whom is prone to violence, and the other carries the terrible burden of emotional distance. Even so, I carried my passion for skiing with me long after I left my childhood home.

“Accidents can happen,“ goes the saying and it’s true. Looking into the cause of an accident too closely can lead to getting caught up in certain feelings behind their occurrence. “What did I do to deserve this? Nothing!“ “How can this happen to me? I don’t believe it.“ “Thank God it happened when I was in the prime of my physical strength.“

I’ve asked both of these questions and made this latter comment more times than I can count. And I’ve had good reason for it, as I suppose anybody might. But one of the things I learned about myself as a kid was that there was no place to go but up once the bottom was reached. Nobody taught me that; I learned it on my own.

I also learned that I could survive “the bottom,“ and that surviving it as I have so many times led me to not fear “the bottom.“

Though “the bottom“ can be defined so differently from person to person, I don’t think anybody can claim to not understand what that means.

Not fearing hitting rock-bottom has been a theme in my life perhaps, but it remains a life-saving theme as well.

Given my strict adherence to a healthy diet, regular exercise and a constant pursuit of a healthy love and family life, I remained captive to the sexy packaging of many things. Bicycle parts: frames, shoes, helmets, and more. Before that, it was skis, boots, poles etc.

Most recently, my prime attraction has been for comfort food, which is perhaps the most seductively package of all. Only the former two lists of seductive packaging we’re not inherently unhealthy. “Comfort food,“ which is just another name for junk food may be the sexiest of all to me, but that’s likely because I have forever tried to abstain completely from it instead of creating a comfortable balance, a positive compromise between consuming and abstaining.

My very youth would suggest that I could recover physically from some Oreos or M&M‘s now and then instead of creating a situation of wholesale deprivation. Junk food, then, was simply a form of self deprivation.

As a paperboy, I always had change for whatever I needed or wanted. Given a kid’s wants and needs, I knew that I was a success in this regard. It was about that time, the span of about 3 to 4 years that I also began realizing that this success could not last.

Perhaps it was because I lucked into my paper route, initially taking it as a replacement for the lawn mowing and yardwork I’d done for years. Maybe I’d like it, maybe I wouldn’t, but it was something I tried I’d have tried. And just maybe I’d have a little fun in the process, even if things didn’t work out.

Back then, people didn’t receive their news on smartphones, tablets or other digital formats. Then, an old-school copy of the daily was delivered to a customer’s front door. No real time news existed for most people. Aside from the evening paper, and radio and TV news, no real time news existed. Then, for most people’s tastes, that was plenty.

I saw myself as a news junkie then just as I remain today, though the old days it was in a far more limited capacity. I was hungry to open my world, to learn new things and meet new people, to soak up my surroundings like the sponge I truly was.

While I thought I was learning about the world, in hindsight I see that I was also learning what my place in the world might be. For some reason, maybe because all of the options available it seems so attractive I could never pick just one approach to the world in which is so myself.

There were so many ways in which I saw myself fitting in to the world that I was overwhelmed. Without direction, I might as well have been going nowhere.

So perhaps it was only natural that I concluded my successful youth would be punctuated by a later adulthood that would be neither noteworthy nor financially successful. I also forecast that I’d one day again see a degree of success reflective of that I enjoyed in my youth.

Though I knew it’d come later in adulthood, I couldn’t predict how, why, or what would happen to trigger it. I just consoled my mind with the knowledge and the comforting confidence in my belief.

Now, in my early 50s I suppose it’s fair to say that I’ve reached later adulthood and I that I’m also primed and ready to find that success I’d predicted would come all along. Once again, hindsight, illustrates that I have, indeed been building toward this moment, and the next and the next all along. With each breath I take it seems my resolve to reach that success grows.

Today, on the eve of my sixth anniversary in which I nearly died in a bicycle accident with a car I have pause to reflect on what happened and why. Though I will never have complete understanding of what the Universe was trying to teach me at the time, I don’t think it’s necessary or even worthwhile to try to figure it out.

It’s enough to say that I’ve survived perhaps the most physically violent sort of ordeal anyone can literally walk away from. I’ve taken literally everything that’s been thrown at me, up to and including death and managed to walk away largely intact.

Though today I have only one arm and a body and mind covered with scars, I survived. I am a survivor and, what’s more a proud survivor. Looking back on the things I’ve done all throughout life, my body and my mind were covered with scars long before my bicycle accident with that car.

Looking back, it’s clear that I’ve put myself in a position where I feel I could’ve died a million times over and perhaps that was my subconscious plan. But I didn’t know that then and anyway this plan did not fit in with what I predicted my life would become in my later years. Now I’m downright excited about what lies ahead.

I am an athlete and in my chest beats a heart that has always been active and alive and even largely satisfied. And I’m pretty happy in general, thank you very much. This, not despite my meager wants and needs but because of them. I’ve neither had much stuff nor much money. But I’ve been comfortable in remaining true to my myself and my values.

Though I learned early on that I might experience loss despite the importance of things then, I can’t imagine anything more personal than limb loss.

So, while beer cans, bottle caps, and baseball cards are temporary, limb loss lasts a lifetime and it doesn’t get more personal than that. And my limb loss occurred while I, not someone else was guiding my ship through life.

That said, I have always seemed to travel light when it comes to people as well, often for divergent reasons and also by design. I tend to not shed myself of acquaintances for any particular reason. Rather, I tend to replace former casual friends with new ones.

Perhaps early in life I understandably developed trust issues with others due to developmental trauma. While I’m sure that’s still buried in my mind somewhere, I’ve sustained enough concussions and a near fatal head trauma to lay claim to a highly unreliable short term memory.

A handful of people is my maximum number that allows me to best balance out my mental resources. Everything functions smoothest overall this way. Still, a handful of positive people occupy a permanent spot in my memory.

Among them are my ex-in-laws who, before, during and after the marriage have defined “friendship” in every way. They are as unconditionally loving and as thoughtful as anyone could ever hope to find in another person/people.

They’re a terrific package deal with whom I’d hope to have become friends whether or not it was through a marriage. And, as friends, they’re an inspiration to me. Their brand of positive empowerment and support is unlikely I’ve known, or will ever know.

By now they know me, or at least enough of what makes me tick to put in their two cents on whatever they think I might like to have in my world. Velda, my ex-mother-in-law is a deceptively strong and wise person, hidden behind a sort of kewpie doll face.

But there’s nothing deceptive about her, for her apparent cover girl personality belies a certain diplomatic wisdom. She recently articulated something so quickly and so succinctly that I’d challenge even the best silver-tongued lawyer to outdo.

In so doing, she showed a rarely-seen (at least to me) side of her I’d never known was there except anecdotally through my ex-extended family.

Ken, my ex-father-in-law personifies my definition of what being a well-grounded and also a well-grounded person should be. Need some advice on your car? How about a word or two on just about any subject imaginable?

Just ask Ken and he’ll likely point out an answer or a suggestion in his own particular voice, which has yet to leave me feeling stupid or that he’s a smarty-pants know-it-all. His stream of consciousness fuels much of what he says, creating a degree of honest transparency I’ve yet known.

“Yeah, them Fords weren’t built to last for more than two hundred thousand miles,” he’ll say, “so you better start looking for a new one around one-seventy-five.”

Or “..the poor dairy farmer thought he’d lost thirteen head of cows when it turned out they had fallen into a sinkhole and were waiting to be rescued.”

Except perhaps for his view on Ford engines, these are contrived stories, of course. There can be no way to sum up anyone’s thinking in only a few sentences. But this offers a gist of the flavor behind Ken’s words and the mind behind them, too.

Though age would seem counterintuitive to any of our contemporaries being like parents to our inner child, they’ve always been the two safest people I’ve met. In fact, a big reason we’re close today is because they shredded my trust issues by drowning me in more loving acceptance than I ever knew existed.

I don’t mean this in a weird, holy-roller kind of way where they keep hitting you over the head with their mindset until you relent because you can’t take any more.

That’s not them at all. And don’t thake this to mean they are pushovers in any way, but they simply live the way they think, and Love is what they think. And anyone who gets to know them, myself included is better for their influence.

Spend any amount of time with them as I have over the last few days and you might not believe your eyes and ears. People are people first and foremost though certain people, family mostly understandably take priority.

But the seemingly endless string of unrelated and even unlikely people who make up their own group of acquaintances is remarkable. Take the forty-something Village Inn waitress who had one eye made up in red and the other in blue.

I at first mistook this woman to be a victim of domestic abuse until I realized that her eye coloring was intentional. Didn’t faze Ken and Velda a bit, not any more than seeing a picture of me racing a bicycle in tight short pants. The very notion strikes me as borderline ridiculous, and I am the one in the pictures!

Or how about the dyed-in-the-wool cowboy at the Chinese restaurant late one Friday night? This man was so happy to be enjoying the moment he was sharing with his kids that he simply had to share it with Ken and Velda. Since he was on the opposite side of the restaurant everyone heard about it, too.

But that was part of the charm behind his message: “Fourteen already,” he said to them, “enjoy it while you can, they grow up fast!” as if Ken and Velda were nervous teenagers expecting their first child.

I don’t know what Ken and Velda might have been thinking but the man’s words were reminiscent of birthday parties I’d once known as a kid myself. And, yep, I guess I did grow up fast, same as everyone does. I’d like to think Ken and Velda would have had similar thoughts.

As it happened, they knew the man’s kids and spoke a little of how they remembered this one at this age or another one at that age. I suppose it’s a certain deferential knowledge they have of their neighbors, and a certain willingness to call things as they are. Nothing offensive is ever intended from them and, far as I know none has ever been taken.

They remain great people to know and, if the measure of a marriage includes the friends you make throughout it then I’d say mine was a success. I’d like to think I’ve brought the best points of my own past to my friendship with those two though, even if I didn’t, it wouldn’t matter to them.

Again, it’s as unconditional a friendship as I’d ever known, and I’m grateful for that knowledge. Which leads me to my dream.

Last night I had one of those dreams during which I actually said the words “This is not a dream-it’s real!” In my dream I was an interesting and particularly physically able blend between my own, current body and that of another amputee I met two days before.

Though in real life our first meeting lasted only a few minutes, Dennis, who’d lost part of one arm and had only partial use of the other for 44 years said a few words that will forever have lasting impact for me.

“You learn to live with it.” Nobody else saying those words could ever have held my ear as his did that morning. I made a point to see him this morning, where we first met along a place called the Arkansas Riverwalk Trail. He, like me has a morning routine with his dog and I can only say that I knew he’d be there.

I told him a little about my dream which, as I figured he’d think was nonsense. In fact, I think I wanted him to think of my dream that way because I wanted to confirm that my understanding of him, albeit brief, was accurate.

He wasn’t abrupt or rude about it, just speaking in a manner that I understood right away to be consistent with his own beliefs. In short, he was also speaking with his own brand of deferential acceptance; we agree to disagree.

And in his disagreement lie his strength and my acceptance of him as a peer; not as another person with a visible disability but as a good person in general.

It was on the basis of this sudden, strong kinship that I know would have become a good friendship had I not already made plans to leave town, and the positive, enabling influence of Ken and Velda’s support that inspired my dream.

In it, not only did I still have both arms but they worked so completely and with such strength that I couldn’t even tell which of them I’d lost. In one part of the dream it was the right arm I’d recovered, in another the left.

All throughout I was skiing with the same strength and finesse that I’d ever had. What’s more, the skiing conditions were my absolute favorite; spring skiing in just bibs and a sweater. Sunglasses, and red-faced from my face’s first peek at the springtime sun.

But no matter, I had a whole season of skiing behind me and was just out for fun, not for a challenge. The snow was granular from repeated freeze-thaw cycles and the moguls were full and just waiting to be danced through.

One or two others who were also caught up in the moment and savoring the beginning of their downhill run shouted a greeting to me and I back to them. The air was full of joy and, at that moment nothing else in the world mattered. Nothing else could.

My memory of the dream ended with me in the midst of the bumps, as ever, thinking “I made it! Both my arms are working together and, look! My left arm is as strong as ever!”

As dreams tend to go, at least my dreams, a stranger momentarily appeared to whom I extended my hand, saying “Go ahead, shake it!” and giving his hand a hard squeeze. Then, returning my focus again to the bumps I shouted “This is no dream, it’s really happening!”

Then, of course I awoke from the dream knowing otherwise. But two differences stand out about this dream. First, I almost never, ever make any sort of remark about my limb loss as being anything more than that.

Still, I know that my right arm often wishes it weren’t so alone and that it still had the other to help carry the load and to provide some sorely missed balance to my upper body. It’s too heartbreaking for me to speak these words aloud so they only come out in my dreams, and even then.

Second, I awoke from this dream feeling good about myself and the sheer strength within me that lives on despite my limb loss. I felt downright great, and empowered enough to say aloud words that I almost never think: “I’m still an extremely strong man, not because I survived a horrific accident but on my own merits.”

Today, only two days before the sixth anniversary of my bicycle accident with a car and in the very midst of a Trauma Season that I’ve been determined to triumph over I’m feeling stronger than I ever have since my accident.

What’s more, I recognize that the physical strength I enjoyed up until the moment of impact was a completely different kind of strength than that which I now have. And the answer for that is simple: I have a very different, but no less strong body with which to work.

This isn’t a revelation to me, for I could have spoken these words many times over. It’s just now they carry meaning for me, and I finally accept it as truth.

Dedicated to my friends, Ken and Velda, and to my new friend, Dennis, whose curious dog Ruby and my finicky Sophie have more or less chosen to agree to disagree.