Making Widows Wince

”Charlie don’t surf” Lualualei Naval Magazine – this was the medical dispensary that I worked at from 1973-77 as a hospital corpsman. We were on 4-section duty for the time I was there, meaning every 4 th  day we stayed 24 hours – we slept in the back. We walked across a field (where the big tree is) and ate at the marine mess hall. This was before microwave ovens, ATM machines, cell phones, cable tv and the internet – this was the real olden days, we read books and wrote down things. The marines called us all Doc and were reverential. – we were treated well, probably because of Viet Nam and the other wars that popped in and out of reality. Hospital Corpsman were very helpful in wars and we had a lot of goodwill built up because of this. Where you see the tires parked on the side of the building used to be a covered parking spot that held the ambulance – It was an old school station wagon ambulance and for calls at night we called a marine over from the barracks ne...

--> "When writing the story of your life, don't let anyone else hold the pen"  Warren Zevon Breakfast was a weekend thing for Mary and me, at least until the whole era of weight loss began. Though we still get up early on occasion, and still eat too much for fun, it’s now more disciplined – we’ve become warriors of the chronically hungry, we are fighting for our fitness. It’s like being in a church built for a cold and withholding god, or just a regular church with bad wafers and cloistered people telling you how to live. With the season changing to sweater weather and an easier way to hide the fat, it is even more of a treat to eat breakfast out – and the cold firms you up and reduces the jiggles when you walk back to the car of shame and go home. Los Gatos Café is a favorite -- the potatoes are to die for, the bacon crisp, and they offer a bakery item with every meal. The seating is tight, lots of people have disposable income, kids,...

End of Road trip (part 3) “We travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls. “ Anaïs Nin I ended the last part of this tale by leaving Seligman, part 3 will be a backward version of the front two parts. Think of it as a formal, structured telling, like some villanelle with funky tercets that are placed out of context and instead in time, or a Looney Toon projected on a womb.   It was still early afternoon when I left Seligman, and I thought again about ending this story where it seemed to end, but here we are. Instead of heading back to Kingman the way I came -- on the cop infested 2-lane road that has become the dead dream shopping cart of the old route 66, I jumped onto Interstate 40 – one of the very last sections of the interstate system to be completed, excepting Hawaii. I think it took so long because it was so hard to do, and the fact that it’s in the middle of Arizona, a place where it’s easy not to care, and wh...