Barbara Stoner's Blog

Jerry Converse

Jerry Converse

A couple of weeks ago, I got word that Jerry Converse had died. No word on where or how. I like to think it was with a bong by his side and a smile on his lips. Much like our Jerry of legend is said to have gone. With the smile, at any rate.

I knew Jerry from Dead Nights at the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle, where he would set up in a booth over by the pool tables with piles of tie dye shirts and himself as the model. Don’t think I talked to him much. His designs and dyes were not quite my style. Cartoons. Splashy lettering. Garish colors. But a great many Deadheads in the Moon loved them, and Dead Nights saw those shirts dancing around the bar as the night wore on.

Richard Lee and I ran into him at Dead shows all the time. I remember well one show when lots of the Seattle people were staying at the same Motel 6 (a friend of mine had a Motel 6 Road Warriors tee shirt that I coveted). Jerry was in the room next to ours with his running buddy, Bill Adams. I don’t remember why, but I found occasion to run next door after a show, only to find the room filled with smoke and bathed in garish light from a tie dye shirt taped over the smoke alarm. “Close the door,” one of them yelled. They had fired up a small barbecue set for an apre’ show steak.

Then there was the New Year’s Show when Richard and I had been shut out of actual New Year’s. We had tickets for the three preceding show, however, so of course we were in Oakland for the duration. Jerry didn’t have tickets, but he was vending in the parking lot at all the shows. This was strictly illegal, according to the Oakland police. At least they used it as a pretext for offering the hippies free accommodations for the night. We were with a bunch of people listening to the shows being broadcast on radio, when somehow we learned that Jerry had been picked up for vending and arrested for carrying “narcotics.” This, we knew to be bullshit. Jerry would have had pot and a pipe on him, but nothing else. Suspecting planted evidence, we waited for news. When it seemed nothing more was coming, Richard and I took Bill with us to our motel room for the night. In the morning, all was well, Jerry told stories about kidding around with the cops, and we all drove back up the I-5 to Seattle. Both Jerry and Bill are gone now. I hope somewhere in the great beyond, they are reminiscing up a storm and keeping an ear cocked for familiar guitars.

I don’t remember when or how Jerry suggested I ride with him and another woman cross-country to the Dead shows in Chicago and Deer Creek (Indiana) in 1992. Richard Lee and I had been together a couple of years by then, and it was the first time in a relationship that I decided on my own that I was going, by myself, to the shows. A ride across half the country in a touring bus with a couple of fellow Deadheads –Richard couldn’t leave his job – I just had to go. And I’ve never forgotten it. It was its own kind of epic trip.

That was when I met Sarah, who has remained a dear friend of many years. I was not too impressed at first – maybe because when he picked me up she was already in the shotgun seat. And then halfway out of town, she discovered that she had forgotten her weed, so we had to go back. I didn’t smoke – not pot, anyway – so I wasn’t in the loop. And then we had to stop for one last latte at a gas station in Spokane, because she was certain there would be no such thing as espresso at gas stations further east. She was right. And she didn’t like Bobby songs. But then she helped me persuade Jerry that we had to go out of our way to visit Devil’s Tower because “Close Encounters.” I still have my pewter jackalope around here somewhere. And I love Sarah.

We stopped in Madison to pick up my son, Christopher, for the Chicago shows. And we stayed at my brother Randy’s in Chicago for those shows. So much fun for everyone concerned. Christopher went back to Randy’s after the last show, but we three journeyed on to Indiana. In the pouring rain. It rained and it rained and it rained, all the way down the highway to Indiana, on the thousands of Deadheads heading for the next shows. By the time we were halfway there, and deciding that perhaps a motel room might be worth it, we discovered that a few thousand Deadheads ahead of us thought the same thing, and as the miles went by so did the “No Vacancy” signs on every motel in sight. Then the Beast began coughing or chugging or something, and Jerry stopped and got out of the van in the pouring rain to check the engine. Nothing he could do here, so we chugged on and finally pulled off the highway into a gas station where the manager called around and found one motel room available. Sarah and I took a cab to the motel. Jerry slept in the van.

It was a time when summer was always great and winter was always rainy, but the shows were always sweet and I rode shotgun with Jerry for the next few years. We had a routine. I saved the seats while he sold his shirts. Our last show together was back in Indiana, although I hadn’t gone east with him. He had gone much earlier for the east coast shows. I, however, flew into Indianapolis with the understanding that Jerry and the Beast would be traveling that way around the time my plane landed. There was no sign of him by the time I got outside. Lots of other Heads were there, getting picked up by friends. I was offered several rides. Don’t know why I didn’t take any of them. I had no way of knowing just where Jerry was. This was back in the days before cell phones, you know. But I stayed put and the minutes rolled by as all the cars pulled away, leaving me alone in front of the doors to the terminal. And then I saw it, far off down that straight Indiana road, just barely cresting the horizon. The heavy green forehead of that old Dodge van. I was going to the shows.

As it turned out, there was only one show instead of two – the second one got cancelled after people without tickets had stormed the venue. It had been that kind of tour, Jerry told me. The people he called the “trustfund kids” had been causing trouble all along the way. We didn’t know it, but it was the last tour. Christopher met me in Chicago, and we saw one show together before he had to leave for work. I saw the last show by myself. It was, although no one knew it that July 9th, the very last show of all.

I saw Jerry off and on over the next years. He was always vending at the big Seattle festivals and street fairs. He was a regular vendor at our annual Hemp Fest, where I was Information Booth Coordinator for a while. And there are a few more stories I could tell, I suppose, but they are more about me than Jerry. Jerry stayed the same. Same grin. Same hair and beard. Same laugh. Same attitude.

He gone now, and taken all those good times with him, leaving me so many memories. Maybe some day I’ll tell you about the time Puff and I decided to clean the Beast. Puff had a shop vac. Oh, nevermind. No room here now.

All I can say at this point is that if it wasn’t for Jerry Converse, I would never have seen so many shows in the last years of The Grateful Dead. I wasn’t there at the beginning, but I was there at the end. And Jerry made it all possible.

Biker Girl I

This is me on my boyfriend Steve’s Harley, a Sportster, just before taking off on our grand adventure from the Midwest to Seattle, Washington in 1979, the year we had both graduated from college. I graduated at 36, while he was about 13 years younger, but nevermind. Off we went. Which we had no business doing on a Sportster.

A Sportster is rather lightweight for a Harley, not really built for long hauls. Steve might have known that, but I didn’t. His bike looked big enough to me. I loved it. A Harley Davidson motorcycle in gleaming black, with a long lean panther of a man at the throttle. And me in a new leather jacket proudly perched on the pillion. We wore helmets on the road west because some states required them. Wisconsin didn’t. In Wisconsin, our hair blew free.

Of course, I never thought of learning to ride it. That would mean learning to kick start it with no kickstand in place and keeping it from falling over while I was at it. I used to say I was about as thin as a #2 pencil, and I would have broken both me and the bike. Steve would never have forgiven me for hurting the bike. I did, however, learn the basics of being a biker girl. It was my job to signal turns. Straight left arm for left turns. Straight left arm hooked up at the elbow for right turns. Plus I had very stern rules for myself. Number one rule: never complain. Having no role models, I was in a fantasy land in which I thought strength consisted of silence and compliance. I later met real biker girls. “Old ladies”, more precisely. Who did complain. Who gave the “old man” a real piece of their minds when they were pissed off. Who were strong and competent and had minds of their own. But that is a story of another time.

This picture was taken at my parents’ place near Bemidji, MN. We rode west from there into South Dakota. My big plan for South Dakota was to ride in a halter top soaking up the August sun. Somewhere, god was having himself a good laugh. South Dakota was cold and windy. I never even took my jacket off. Even worse, it took us a week to reach Wyoming. You might even call South Dakota a shakedown cruise. If it was gonna shake down, it shook down in South Dakota.

Somewhere between the border with Minnesota and Pierre, something shook off – I don’t remember what. A brake cover? It escapes me. The friendly Harley shop that sheltered us for a couple of days had to send to Rapid City for it. All I remember is spending some time looking at the Missouri River, winding placidly along, and reading “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” which I don’t think taught me anything particularly zen and nothing about motorcycle maintenance. My code of silence and compliance was about as zen as I would ever get. Could have used a little bit of motorcycle maintenance though.

You have not lived until you have ridden down the wall of the Badlands with no clutch cable as your driver manually kicks the gears from one to another down the steep descending curves of the road. No wonder most of the bikes you see pictured gathered at Sturgis are hogs. Big, burly motorcycles packed with every tool and spare part one might possibly need on an overland trip. We got nuthin’. So we just bucked down the winding road to the tiny hamlet of Interior, South Dakota, which boasted a garage where Steve took the bike and a tavern where I went to play pool.

Steve never taught me to drive a motorcycle, but he did teach me how to shoot pool. I loved it, I loved getting good at it. Pool was not a game one had to hurry with. Everyone involved was patient with the one lining up a shot. And everyone involved was impressed when a difficult shot went right. I got to be very good at taking somewhat difficult shots. In the hamlet of Interior, I played pool with a few local ranchers. Not ranch hands, it seemed. Maybe they were busy working the ranches. No, these were weathered looking older men who claimed to own ranches, one in particular boasted of thousands of acres. Interior is just off the northeast corner of the Pine Ridge Reservation of the Sioux. I didn’t bring it up, but I eyed the ranchers suspiciously and played the best I could in silent honor of the victims of Wounded Knee. I think I won a couple of games, too. Or maybe the wizened old rancher who seemed to have taken a shine to me let me win. Whatever. I was very relieved to see Steve come in. He had managed to jury-rig a cable that we hoped would last until Rapid City. So I bid farewell to the ranchers and we took off down Route 44, the scenic route through the Badlands that skirted the northern border of Pine Ridge.

The scenic route was well worth it and if you ever have the chance, go for it. For one thing, it helps you bypass the siren call of Wall Drugs, which is not worth it at all. I followed it one time years later and was sorry. For another it leads you through a stone forest, rock formations rising one after another from the valley floor roughly sculpted by wind and water into a crenellated tableland, a magical landscape where there is nary a green plant to be seen, but where one could well imagine there be dragons. Clutch cable be damned, we could not resist one stop to test ourselves against the ramparts.

We found a clutch cable in Rapid City and rode on west into the Black Hills National Park, where we set up what we thought would be our last campsite in South Dakota. Wyoming was just over yonder. When we woke in the morning it was raining.

To be continued …

Jack

There was the time Jack helped Richard and I move out of our apartment. We had a balcony running the length of the place that hung over parking spaces that backed onto the alley. The guys were running boxes of this and that, stereo equipment, bits of furniture – you know. All that kind of stuff.

Then we got to the couch. It was a tight squeeze and a narrow stairway down to the truck, and while the guys were all looking at each other trying to figure out the trajectory, Jack hollered up from the truck bed. “Toss it over the railing.” So they did. And it worked.

At least that’s how I remember it. Now that I think about it, maybe taking it over the railing was Brandon’s idea. Brandon was the brains of the outfit. Brandon was Jack’s running buddy, his Tom Sawyer to Jack’s Huckleberry Finn. When I first met Jack, the two were inseparable.

Jack and Brandon both were romantic heroes to me, a landlubbing girl from the flatlands. They were crab fishermen, who sailed the Bering Seat, hauling in pots of king crab for the seafood restaurants at home in Seattle and everywhere else. The Bering Sea. The Alaska Straits. Kodiak Island. It was all as romantic as Timbuktu to me. I was fascinated.

Have you ever read books by Jack London? I asked Jack one time? No, he said. What did were they about. Oh, you know, I said. Tough times in Alaska. There’s one about a boat. Yeah? I had forgotten most of the plot of Sea Wolf, so I just said that it was about a cruel captain and bad weather. Jack he looks at me and says, Yeah. Sounds about right.

I was to later come to the sad conclusion that I didn’t think Jack had read a book since Dick and Jane, and I wasn’t entirely sure he finished that one. But I wish I had had a tape recorder on when he told me his fishing tales. I remember one where he had managed to break a foot – at least he thought he had broken it. But a storm was coming up and they had to lift the pots. Foot or no foot. So he shoved that foot into a boot and went out on deck, and there is no way I can write anything that can capture his tale, but it involved stormy weather and slippery decks and heavy crab pots and various metal objects that kept slamming into his foot … and I was laughing so hard it was a while before I could catch my breath enough to tell him that sorry for laughing about your broken foot. But Jack was grinning all the while, as if it had been the funniest thing that had ever happened to him. He loved telling stories. “Did I ever tell you about the time we was crabbing and I almost went overboard?” he would ask. And then he would be off.

Jack pulling me onto dance floors where he was an enthusiastic, not to say good, dancer who boogied away to his own rhythm. I gave up trying to follow him and boogied to my own. Worked out perfectly.

Jack taking us all out on his fishing boat, the Michael (he told me nobody had known how to spell Michelle), inherited from his dad, I think, after a Kuli Loach gig on my birthday and making me drive. “Just don’t make a wake,” he said. “Don’t want to bring the Harbor Patrol.” So we cruised around Lake Union at a snail’s pace in the early morning hours. One of my favorite birthdays.

Jack sitting on a tent canvas in a pile of tent poles right outside my tent asking if I can help him put up damned tent. With both of us drunk and high on LSD, I told him to lie down and go to sleep. You can come in if it rains. It didn’t rain.

Jack coming to the rescue when my daughter Caroline was arrested for socking her housemate in the nose (he was pounding on her door threatening to kill her because she had caught him and his girlfriend stealing stuff from another housemate who was out of town – or something like that), and we moved Caroline’s stuff out of that house lickety split.

How he always called Caroline, “Carolina, the dancing machine.” How we never figured out where he got that, since I don’t think he ever saw her dance and she was anything but a machine. It was just Jack.

How he stole a puzzle piece off my jigsaw puzzle table one time, but his girlfriend Theresa made him give it back. He wanted to wait until I was done and then come to the rescue. Very funny, Jack.

And speaking of Theresa, how they got a dog (that she inherited in the breakup) that they named Louis Bulis III. And how they all rolled out onto my front lawn after a Neil show in Portland yelling, "Call 911 Pizza!"

How he came to every single one of my parties, especially the big yard parties where he insisted he had to stay to finish the keg, and he was always the last one to leave. Sometime in the middle of the next day, after he had passed out at the bottom of my bed, with me curled up on my pillow, and the two of us picking up keg cups and restoking the fire pit and talking and laughing until he really did have to go.

Esther Bulis, his sister-in-law, recalls him as a “funny, loving, loud and boisterous brother.” He was that to me, too. Always introduced me as his big sister.

I loved him, though. More than a brother, but never a lover. I don’t know why – just was always a little happier when he was around. I think he felt the same way, in a way. It was my fault that I messed that up by asking him for a goodnight kiss, after we had been at a show at the Showbox. Poor guy had no way of knowing that I had decided that it was a date – but not just any date. It was my last date. I never wanted to “date” anybody again = I was in my 60’s, 22 years older than Jack - so it was somehow appropriate, in my squirrelly little head, that my very last date would be Jack Bulis. Because I never wanted to take him home or anything. So neither one of us had anything to fear from that.

But he didn’t know that, and when I saw him again at a Kuli Loach gig, he danced attendance on me a little bit – maybe he thought he was supposed to or something. So I asked him to take me out to the boat, when I fully intended to tell him that I was looking forward to dancing at his wedding some day – anyway, to make it clear that I didn’t expect him to act all boyfriendy just because I’d asked for that kiss, but somehow I mentioned the word married first (totally forgetting that he already had a kid and that it hadn’t turned out well) – as something I thought he might want to do some time (he was always talking about his family – I think he loved them and you all very much) – and he immediately panicked and wouldn’t let me get another word in edgewise as he assured me over and over again that no, he never wanted to get married (at this point, I realized that he probably thought that I meant married to me) and anyway - if that scene were in a movie, it would have been hilarious. In real life, I think I had managed to bungle a wonderful friendship that had worked for us both.

How could I forget Jack’s complete inability to understand metaphor?

I know what we will all hear is how he died an alcoholic, how that was what killed him, one way or another. But I want people to know how much more he was. He was, as I have said, a crab fisherman, almost a super hero to me, who lived a life I had only read about in a book by Jack London. He was a union member, a longshoreman, who worked the port of Seattle, one of the busiest ports on the West Coast. And he was, importantly, a Deadhead, one of the happy few like me who lived at the same time as Jerry Garcia. And to top it off, because otherwise I would never have met him, he was a Blue Mooner, a special little tavern in the north end of Seattle, on the west edge of the University District, where people like Jack and me and so many others found a home.

Where we would often hear someone play Robert Hunter’s “Boys in the Barroom.”

Does God look down on the boys in the barroom?
Mainly forsaken but surely not judged.
Jacks, Kings and Aces their faces in wine.
Do Lord, deliver our kind.

I hope he finds a heaven with a camper van, a quiet fishing hole, a case of beer and a good dog. And somebody to tell his stories to. “Hey, have I told you about the time me and Brandon went fishing in a snow storm?”

He was a simple, good-hearted boy, and so many of us loved him.

The Front Man

The Former Guy, as I like to call him, may not have heard of Project 2025, but you can bet your buttons that Project 2025 has heard of him. In fact, I have come to believe that most of the support for TFG by conservative elites is in service to Project 2025. That The Former Guy is, likely without his direct knowledge, merely the Frontman. He is being used, much like a lubricated latex glove on the hand of a proctologist, to insert a middle finger into the bowels of government. Once in office, he would bring in a host of helpers, all swearing loyalty to him, but in fact loyal to Project 2025. All of whom would dedicate themselves to convincing TFG that even the parts he might not like were actually his idea to begin with.

The job of those who have managed to get closest to him, to be seen as the most loyal, will be to tell him daily of the genius that is gutting environmental protection in favor of the oil industry. That has put the idea of the Christian family at the center of Health and Human Services. That has solved the homeless problem for all time by sending them camping in the western deserts.

This is the stuff of many a dystopian novel that I might once have devoured with relish, knowing that by the end of the book all the new rules have backfired and that the day will be saved by a few foolhardy souls who find a way to tell truth to power. But this is not a novel. Project 2025 is a real plan, put forward by real “think tanks,” with an eye to making a conservative Christian nation out of a once proud progressive secular country. And they’ve got the perfect front man to make it all happen.

This bugger, the Project 2025 paper, is long, but if you scroll to the “Personnel” section for each department you will find one constant: Political People. As deep as you can go. The plan is to fire as many career personnel as possible, replacing them with people loyal to the President and committed to implementing “his,” i.e. Project 2025’s, policies. So, okay. We’ve got them on board. What policies?

Well, for one thing, agencies must keep anti-life “benefits” out of benefit plans.

The next to go will be anyone in the military claiming to be transgender. “Gender dysphoria” P2025 calls it. Like there are people in the military wandering around in a state of confusion. They gotta go. In the service with HIV? Need an abortion? That’s your own fault. Not the job of the military to help you out. Meanwhile, we need more and better nukes. As in bombs. The more the merrier. Yee haw, etc.

P2025 just loves getting rid of stuff. The entire Department of Education, for instance. But before that goes, they (yes, Virginia, there is a “they” in this story) want to put education back in the hands of the states..back in the hands of the communities…back in the hands of parents. And if you think that sounds like a good thing, think about what actual parents in actual communities in a few actual states might want their children taught.

Two of the favorite words used in the Project 2025 report are “repeal” and “avoid.” As in repeal acts which provide subsidies to renewable energy. Repeal concern about climate change. Avoid “over-regulation.”

Other favorites are “replace,” “demand,” “prohibit,” “eliminate,” and “abolish.”

They plan to replace LGBTQ+ equity with support for traditional families, maintaining a “biblically based, social science–reinforced definition of marriage & family; demand that the CDC research and publish all risks and complications from abortions and use of the abortion pill; prohibit abortion travel funding; eliminate the week-after-pill from the contraceptive mandate as a potential abortifacient; restore* Trump religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate; and abolish research using fetal tissue obtained from elective abortions.

*Any use of the word “restore* is likely not a good thing.

Eliminate the Head Start program. Yeah. Oh, and no money for child care centers. All child care is, apparently, to be done at home. Prohibit noncitizens, including mixed-status families, from living in federally assisted housing. Eliminate regulations in regard to climate change, but add a bunch more to HUD. Because most of the homeless scum are lying scum, I suppose.

Issue guidance in the Justice Dept. to ensure that litigation decisions are consistent with the President’s agenda and the rule of law. (Ensuring that the President can pursue his perceived enemies.) Pursue aggressive enforcement of the immigration laws. (Track ‘em down and lock ‘em up.) Eliminate racial classifications. (Is anyone discriminating against minorities? Hard to tell.) Eliminate disparate impact as a valid theory of discrimination. (Hard to describe disparate impact without racial classifications.) Focus enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of “sex.” Enforce the Comstock Act. Deploy the military for domestic law enforcement.

Finally, the proposals for the Dept. of Transportation make no mention whatsoever of high speed trains. Need I say more there?

So that, I think, is the nut of the thing, although a close reading will reveal much, much more. If you love a good policy paper studded with a healthy dose of alphabet soup have at it.

“In July 2024, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said, ‘we are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.’ ”

The Former Guy is the perfect front man for all of this. He with his beloved MAGAs are the shock troops that will carry it forward. Does he realize that? I highly doubt it. He certainly hasn't read the thing. Policy is not his forte. Policy is what he barks at his minions. "Investigate Biden!" "Round up the aliens!" Project 2025 is how they propose to carry it out.

Tags: Politics

The House on West Forest

Of all the houses I lived in as a child, the one on West Forest Avenue in Decatur, IL, is the one I remember most. I brought it back to life in two of my novels. That front porch you see there had the swing in which fictional me met my first love, Jack, featured in Ghosts of the Heart. It was a huge house, big enough for my family of Mom and Dad, little sister, and four younger brothers. It was here that I shoved my little brother Paul down the stairs for the crime of reminding me of my worst self.

That upper bedroom window on the right is the one that looked out on the world from the double bed I shared with my sister, a room reinvented for a chapter of A Dream of Houses. And that is where I loved to escape on lazy afternoons to read and dream – sometimes to be afraid. Very afraid. And what was I afraid of, you might ask. Was my mother cruel? Was my father predatory? Oh, no. No, not at all. I was afraid of vampires. That story is told in full here: And while my parents were basically straight out of Father Knows Best, they were far too dull for my romantic soul, which was also steeped in Cowboys and Native Americans. But TV cowboys were a little too placid for me. Too pasty. Too neat. No, I didn’t want to be a cowboy. I wanted to be a Native American, and spent long hours on that shared bed, under that window, pouring over the Rand McNally Atlas, tracing out a route to uninhabited areas of Canada, where I felt certain I would find some untamed Native Americans, who would understand my predicament and welcome me into the tribe. Somewhere around James Bay, I think it was.

I was sure that no one would miss me. Certainly not my little sister, who didn’t like sharing a bed any more than I did and slept wrapped up in her own special quilt as far away from me as possible. Joanie wasn’t a cuddler, not even on cold winter nights, when my skinny frame had just enough fat on it to keep the bones from showing. But the more I looked at those maps, the more I noticed all that lay between me and those faraway woodlands. All those highways. All those cities. A couple of peanut butter sandwiches just wasn’t going to make it. Later, I thought. But by the time later came, the dream had faded. That’s one of the things that growing up will do to you.

I loved that house. I didn’t like leaving it for the nice new split-level my dad had made for us, even though it had my own room. I wouldn’t have it for long, because I graduated from high school, went off to college, and then to the big city. I think I have missed the house on West Forest for so long because I left my childhood there. Maybe because I also left many of my dreams there. Life after that time was a crash course in the modern world. No trees to climb. No vampires at the windows. No adoption by Native Americans. Just me. Barely grown-up skinny blonde me. Who, if she had her druthers, would likely have continued to read about life instead of live it. The real world, she would find, was not her oyster.

Windy

Who Has Seen the Wind?

By
Christina Rossetti

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through

.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

Tags: Poetry

Doing the Holiday Rag

It's 1993 and I'm turning 50. Pat and Kerin Lewis threw me a stellar birthday party, too. But wait. That's wrong. They did throw me a stellar birthday party, but it was also a New Year's Eve party AND a wedding anniversary party.

You see, Pat and Kerin had met at the Blue Moon Tavern on New Year's Eve and a year later they were married in the University Universalist Church of which Pat was janitor. I can attest to this. I attended. Not that either one of them were members. It happened that Pat had scored a job as church janitor and maintenance man, and lo and behold the job came with a tidy little brick house, which was just large enough to hold the several galas that the Lewis's held each year. One big one on Pat's Christmas Eve birthday, when Kerin served us all his favorite prime rib and another one on their wedding anniversary.

But something happened on 1992's New Year's Eve - a family emergency, which one of them will no doubt remind me of when reading this. And as luck would have it, one of their faithful friends had a decimal birthday approaching the following Valentine's Day. So here we all are again. And when I say all, I don't think that little house held as many people as my back yard would in years to come, but when I say you couldn't swing a dead cat - not that you'd want to - well, let's just say the Moon didn't do much business on party night until we all decamped there just before midnight. On New Year's Eve, anyway.

Pat Lewis is one of the dearest men alive. He took any job available wherever Kerin's job took her - one year to Juneau, Alaska - but there came a time when, living near Olympia, life gave him a chance to follow in the footsteps of the likes of Abraham Lincoln. He read for the law, and is now a practicing attorney. Kerin, meanwhile, has become a prize-winning chef. And it's been about 30 years since that party. Yeah. They're still together.

So here are Pat and I doing the Holiday Rag. What adventures we have had with each other and our friends. What merriment! Memories that warm my heart forever.

I'm Here For the Weather

You Moist Remember This

by Tom Robbins is a paean to the Pacific Northwest that I embrace with all my heart.

I'm here for the weather.

In the deepest, darkest heart of winter, when the sky resembles bad banana baby food for months on end, and the witch measles that meteorologists call "drizzle" are a chronic gray rash on the skin of the land, folks all around me sink into a dismal funk. Many are depressed, a few actually suicidal. But I grow happier with each fresh storm, each thickening of the crinkly stratocumulus. "What's so hot about the sun?" I ask. Sunbeams are a lot like tourists: intruding where they don't belong, promoting noise and forced activity, faking a shallow cheerfulness, dumb little cameras slung around their necks. Raindrops, on the other hand - introverted, feral, buddhistically cool - behave as if they live here. Which, of course, they do.
…

I thrive here on the certainty that no matter how parched my glands, how anhydrous the creek beds, how withered the weeds in the lawn, it's only a matter of time before the rains come home.

The rains will steal down from the Sasquatch slopes. They will rise with the geese from the marshes and sloughs. Rain will fall in sweeps, it will fall in drones, it will fall in cascades of cheap Zen jewelry.
And it will rain a fever. And it will rain a sacrifice. And it will rain sorceries and saturnine eyes of the totem.
Rain will primitivize the cities, slowing every wheel, animating every gutter, diffusing commercial neon into smeary blooms of esoteric calligraphy. Rain will dramatize the countryside, sewing pearls into every web, winding silk around every stump, re-drawing the horizon line with a badly frayed brush dipped in tea.
And it will rain an omen. And it will rain a trance. And it will rain a seizure. And it will rain dangers and pale eggs of the beast.
Rain will pour for days unceasing. Flooding will occur. Wells will fill with drowned ants, basements with fossils. Mossy-haired lunatics will roam the dripping peninsulas. Moisture will gleam on the beak of the Raven. Ancient shamans, rained from their rest in dead tree trunks, will clack their clamshell teeth in the submerged doorways of video parlors. Rivers will swell, sloughs will ferment. Vapors will billow from the troll-infested ditches, challenging windshield wipers, disguising telephone booths. Water will stream off eaves and umbrellas. It will take on the colors of the beer signs and headlamps. It will glisten on the claws of nighttime animals.
And it will rain a screaming. And it will rain a rawness. And it will rain a disorder, and hair-raising hisses from the oldest snake in the world. Rain will hiss on the freeways. It will hiss around the prows of fishing boats. It will hiss in electrical substations, on the tips of lit cigarettes and in the trash fires of the dispossessed. Legends will wash from the desecrated burial grounds, graffiti will run down alley walls. Rain will eat the old warpaths, spill the huckleberries, cause toadstools to rise like loaves. It will make poets drunk and winos sober, and polish the horns of the slugs.
And it will rain a miracle. And it will rain a comfort. And it will rain a sense of salvation from the philistinic graspings of the world.
Yes, I'm here for the weather. And when I'm lowered at last into a pit of marvelous mud, a pillow of fern and skunk cabbage beneath my skull, I want my epitaph to read, IT RAINED ON HIS PARADE. AND HE WAS GLAD!

Tom Robbins, 1994

Tags: Prose

Toasted in Chicago

Work History II
1964-66

By 1964, I was living in an apartment in Chicago with the man I would soon marry, Christopher’s father, and working as a PR secy/asst. at Fine Hardwoods, down on Michigan Avenue.

I learned a lot on that job – honed my typing skills (learned in a summer class after graduating from high school) and learned how to prepare public relations announcements to be placed in the newspapers – not ads. We weren’t selling anything. We just promoted the use of “fine hardwood veneers.” I became acquainted with such exotics as zebra wood and sandalwood. All of this before office computers – well, if they had been thought of, nobody had one yet. I had an electric typewriter – not sure if my weapon of choice, the IBM Selectric, was even on the market yet.

Anyway, those should have been good years and they should have led to bigger and better things except for one little wrinkle.

My boss.

She was a bit of a martinet, but that was okay. A single woman (never been married) in her 40’s, I think. I was happy to follow her every instruction for a while. Until things got a little weird. No, she didn’t make a pass at me. I don’t think she ever thought of that. It seemed she wanted to adopt me. She scolded me about how I dressed and how I wore my hair. She invited me to her house for dinner. Was it only once? I don’t remember what we ate. But while we were there, she tried to give me a couple of outfits to wear. Something I think she thought more professional? Bottom line, she wanted to make another her out of me, a public relations pro who she could guide to success. The problem was, of course, I didn’t want to be her. I could be a professional caption writer/photo editor, but I could not meet and greet. I was terrible at that. She was disappointed and let me know it.

It was during this time that I decided to get married. Ron wanted to and I finally told him let’s do it now before I change my mind. Things got worse at the office. My boss was horrified that I was getting married. I guess she thought I was kissing my career goodbye. She might even have said that. I was also getting involved with the civil rights movement, to some extent, and talked about it with my co-workers, two of whom had become good office friends. My boss objected. “Negroes” will never be accepted in business, she told me, or words to that effect. I argued with her. Yeah, I know. Big mistake. But she brought it up at times to try to talk sense into me. I had to resist.

The end came one day when she called me into her office for some kind of dressing down – I don’t remember what – but whatever it was I had had enough. I went back to my desk and swept the piles of brochures I had carefully written and designed for some convention or other onto the floor. She ran into the Big Boss’s office screaming, “Fire her! Fire her!” And that was that.

Not long after this, I applied for a job as a copy editor at a products magazine – something I was by that time very well qualified for. But when they called my former employer, they were told I had not done anything except type and that I wasn’t very good at that. I was toast.

Chicago 2nd Job

Work History II
1964-66

By 1964, I was living in an apartment in Chicago with the man I would soon marry, Christopher’s father, and working as a PR secy/asst. at Fine Hardwoods, down on Michigan Avenue.

I learned a lot on that job – honed my typing skills (learned in a summer class after graduating from high school) and learned how to prepare public relations announcements to be placed in the newspapers – not ads. We weren’t selling anything. We just promoted the use of “fine hardwood veneers.” I became acquainted with such exotics as zebra wood and sandalwood. All of this before office computers – well, if they had been thought of, nobody had one yet. I had an electric typewriter – not sure if my weapon of choice, the IBM Selectric, was even on the market yet.

Anyway, those should have been good years and they should have led to bigger and better things except for one little wrinkle.

My boss.

She was a bit of a martinet, but that was okay. A single woman (never been married) in her 40’s, I think. I was happy to follow her every instruction for a while. Until things got a little weird. No, she didn’t make a pass at me. I don’t think she ever thought of that. It seemed she wanted to adopt me. She scolded me about how I dressed and how I wore my hair. She invited me to her house for dinner. Was it only once? I don’t remember what we ate. But while we were there, she tried to give me a couple of outfits to wear. Something I think she thought more professional? Bottom line, she wanted to make another her out of me, a public relations pro who she could guide to success. The problem was, of course, I didn’t want to be her. I could be a professional caption writer/photo editor, but I could not meet and greet. I was terrible at that. She was disappointed and let me know it.

It was during this time that I decided to get married. Ron wanted to and I finally told him let’s do it now before I change my mind. Things got worse at the office. My boss was horrified that I was getting married. I guess she thought I was kissing my career goodbye. She might even have said that. I was also getting involved with the civil rights movement, to some extent, and talked about it with my co-workers, two of whom had become good office friends. My boss objected. “Negroes” will never be accepted in business, she told me, or words to that effect. I argued with her. Yeah, I know. Big mistake. But she brought it up at times to try to talk sense into me. I had to resist.

The end came one day when she called me into her office for some kind of dressing down – I don’t remember what – but whatever it was I had had enough. I went back to my desk and swept the piles of brochures I had carefully written and designed for some convention or other onto the floor. She ran into the Big Boss’s office screaming, “Fire her! Fire her!” And that was that.

Not long after this, I applied for a job as a copy editor at a products magazine – something I was by that time very well qualified for. But when they called my former employer, they were told I had not done anything except type and that I wasn’t very good at that. I was toast.