cheers, Falterer.

Tell Chris I send my love and to smoke a joint!

Although it’s no bed of roses here, It is good to have her at home, where the only abuse she gets comes from me.

As we were marching out of that nursing home, dodging maniacs in wheel chairs, skirting spastics with walkers, steering clear of an aggressive dwarf whose self image must have been 6′7″ and 240 pounds instead of 4′7′ and 90 pounds, I had to keep reminding Chris to hold her head up, to march like a soldier, or surely one of those beefy security types would nab her and slap her in restraints.

It was a quarter mile of hallway, passing the rooms of the incontinent, of alzheimers and the congenitally deformed and deranged and the stuff of your worst nightmares to the elevator. The elevator opened beside the front entrance of the building and we walked straight to my car. I left a pound of rubber in their driveway as I left in a cloud of smoke.

She’s still delusional at times, but this evening she made up with A.J. and that was a happy but tearful scene.

I scope each car passing on our dead-end street, half expecting a cop with a bench warrant in hand to come knocking.

I’ve left craigslist. I can no longer waste my time with reading crap–yours and Rodger’s excepted. Had I not lurked to read yours, I wouldn’t be here to leave this note.

If I begin again, it will be as Ron McKinney, not OldMack.

Thanks for this fine story, Charlie Taylor.