Trick stories need not be made to surprise. Scary is seldom self correcting. What prize sur-ups when you sur prize or are sur prized?

Pop goes the weasel, here we go

Round the mulberry bush

To the dark place

where my great grandpa mack taught his girls to

“brighten the corner, where you are.”

No. that idea is dirty and not true that was not a dark place.

That was “back home”. It was hard-times, not dark-times. Get that right.

My aunt Laura was the best, by far, story teller of the

Previous real story teller’s in my family.

And she kept a diary that has led me to tales

on streams and trails and flood plains of thoughts

That all ran or meandered into the spring and summer of 1917 and then

All the way to now.

She gave nearly nary a line in her diary to darkness and despair.

Truth, she told what a fifteen year old could see in 1917. She did not whine. Never an “are we there yet” Just a few, “I can’t waits”. From a bit west of Abiline, Texas to Parks, Arizona in wagons my great grand-daddy, Mack Boyett, built.  Dirt roads, uphill most of the way, 850 miles, May 2 to July 22, 1917, brightening the entire journey to the future.

I drove that far in two days, last week. I stopped a few places and took some side trips to see where the Hopi had left their journey tokens and where Cochise gave up.

I never knew we could think so high. This line is from later. How…

Naturally, I had been intending to be a story teller all my life, but I made a vow, to that same Great God Almighty mentioned earlier, as being essential to this story,

I was sitting on a smooth wet boulder in sycamore canyon. The bolder is in the verde river, which

Is not too wide and seldom more than four feet deep, there

Where I was sitting I took off my boots and set them neatly upon the dry part of the rock,
toward the middle, then I took out my wallet and tucked it inside because, (a willow flute, imagine here)

I was going to make a run down the river from boulder to boulder, believing my own mantra

There is always a  place to put your foot.

In my wallet was an as yet un-expired Arizona driver license from before my war,

and nothing else I remember, but a little saddle-stiched book I had read through two, or so times before,

Once in Flagstaff, late January, finals week, 1970

The October Moratorium was, maybe, an other time I read that book. Gospel tract,

I latter learned, is what those were called.

Mid May 1970 and ten thousand tales converge here. Converge is a euphemism,

White lie

Deception

Make it simple son, MISS THE POINT OF THE STORY. Life ain’t simple.

The story of life is sublime, not simple. Where all my storys got all tangled up with

History its own self, I suppose, might make

Crazy seem
Euphemistic, but mystic, you know, ain’t bad. If you are aware of the smoke, be aware of the mirrors,

Seek the truth.

The vow that I mentioned I made was to stop telling lies because my lies was addin’ to the overall confusion on planet earth in May of 1970.

I went to jail for that vow, the very next day. That’s a story on several levels, nextime we share a campfire and some cowboy coffee and,   of respect to those who first lived these stories,

a good landrace panama red from a

peace pipe, with white chicken feathers, imagined from a Johnny Mack Brown movie

By some one in Taiwanese exporter, sold in a Route 66 Curio Store—

But that would be sinister

Weak medicine from an aerie in my valley. Zigzags, then.

Magi action. Do what magi did after Daniel and the lions.
You won’t  ever for get how they really

Found the king they sought.

Seeing

plugs in hope
in the darkest places anyone can imagine.

I know. This is my little light.

Too bright? Some people I remember, during the decades I was away, wore sunglasses at night. You could try that. Or close your eyes.

I can adlib from Adam to the door and beyond but

You with me? We can make this story better. Everywhere we are. Thin light is not darkness.