You could say I was a street person back then.
These were the hippie days, late ’60s, San Francisco. Fun times? Love and peace? Sex, drugs and whatever?
Blackbirds, I’ve read, live an average of two to three years. I swear to you, White Spot was already here when I bought my place in 1985. Thirty years later...
You can’t say Rosenberg didn’t warn you.
The Road More Travelled
When my partner Anita, 20 years my junior, winner of triathlons and the most beautiful woman I have known, was dying of cancer, a curious question wormed its way into my mind:
“Dear Prime Minister,” I typed.
She rode into town on a dusty old mountain bike.
She hoisted the heavy pack’s strap onto her right shoulder and slowly jogged to where the Holden sat idling. Approaching on the left, she bent low and peeked in the window. There was only the driver, an older male, sixties, white hair, a craggy, leathery, pleasant face. Immediately, she felt safe.
I couldn’t resist.
Having sworn never again to return to the land of my birth, that lunatic asylum known as America, the comedic insanity of the 2016 presidential election pulled me like a cork from the bottle of southern comfort known as Ohope.
Wise? Me? Yeah, sure.
Substitute bored and more aptly you have my life's story.
A lot of folks tell me living and travelling solo as I do would freak them out: they couldn't handle the loneliness. Me, I have no trouble with lonely. How could I possibly with all those voices yakking in my head.
It took a fall on my head to knock some sense into me. Literally.
And then came a moment, no more than a hair’s-breadth of time, I fell in love.
No, not what you think. This was a different love, true love, an affair of the heart. It happened suddenly, totally unexpected, following five straight days of rain.