Last week, after listening to NPR's "Homework" segment wherein there was a call for scary personal tales, I emailed the following story to the host. The story was almost used on the next Homework segment--I guess almost isn't good enough in the 15 Minutes of Fame area--and because it was fun for me to recall I wanted to tell it here. Come back a ways in time with me, to about 1985 or so, to a crisp October night along the North Platte River in Central Wyoming...

Ten years ago today, my father died in the local hospital after living for over ten years with COPD. He and Mom were four days out from their 49th anniversary—I was 15 away from turning 40. I took care of them both as they aged. I never married, I didn’t date, I worked rarely in the public workplace and instead did my jewelrymaking in my home studio. In exchange for my attention and care, my folks let me live in the little shack on their weekend property rent-free and even provided me with an allowance—in the old days they called this a "remittance."  

A few years back, a fellow ceramics student at Casper College used to come and clean for me because he needed the money and I was damn sick of cleaning my own house. He was argumentative and cavalier with my stuff though, and on the day I found a couple of pieces of fossil oreodont jaw out in the dooryard where he had emptied the dustpan, I fired him and hired Dawn.

Dawn was a tattooed smartass of about 28, married with a young son and a husband who was an habitual petty criminal. They lived in Midwest Wyoming, an oil town that figured into the Teapot Dome oil scandal and that is now barely holding on in the face of the kind of oily, sulfurous neglect that rusts western towns where the pumpjacks outnumber the sober three to one. Dawn was coarse and untamed but conversely bright and funny. She seemed to have endless energy and she practiced yoga and exercised every morning to Jane Fonda’s workout tape. A dusty parade of kids and dogs tracked oilfield mud through her little house. She was the assistant at the preschool who taught swimming and bowling in summer to kids who would otherwise be bored into early crime or pregnancy. She liked to party though, and liked nothing better than to spark up a fatty with the roughneck oilfield and mining crowd she and her husband hung with. Join me below the fold.

I walk my dog in the only (to the best of my knowledge) off-leash city park in the state of Wyoming. The land was donated to the city of Casper by the doctor-rancher who homesteaded it to be used as a sort of "as is" park for the enjoyment of nature. The park encompasses about 30 acres of river bottomland with cottonwood, Russian olive, grey willow and bar willow the dominant tree species, with a few boxelders thrown in. Someone planted grape hyancinths and crocuses a long time ago, and they are naturalized now and spreading where they can find a likely spot. The city paved the ranch two-track that used to wind along the river and made it into a walking and biking trail, joining it to the several miles of trails that cross back and forth over the North Platte. Somewhere along in time they made the park off-leash, and the dogs of Casper have been loving it to death ever since.

More on the other side of the tree.

A skier has broken his leg in a brutal fall. He is gravely injured, but unfortunately he lives in a country where he is not only blamed for breaking his leg, he is denied treatment for it and must hobble around the best he can, crutchless and in agony while the limb heals, if it ever does. The general public in his country also deride him for how all this limping and moaning appears, and he is treated with contempt if not outright hostility wherever he goes. He is insulted in restaurants, denied space on public transportation and he finds he cannot even find trousers that fit his swollen leg. Instead of the sympathy and medical treatment he needs, he is told that, if he really wanted to be cured, he could be. He just needs to have the will to be healed. More below.